COBie: Construction Operation Building Information Exchange
COBie is a standard for the exchange of Building Information during the life of a building project. Information containing specific project details helpful for understanding, operating and maintaining a facility properly. One of the items is the inventory of spaces and their functional requirements.
To facilitate requirements the designer must provide a spatial layout for building, facility, floor & room number which forms the basis of assigning equipment and products to specific space. Strictly, there is no information on interior components such as furniture nor on structural members.
In order to obtain information at right time throughout the life cycle of a facility in BUILDING DELIVERY PROCESS, a mechanism is needed. Such a mechanism should filter out unnecessary information, reorganise for owner’s convenience.
Spreadsheets can be a good tool to manage information in small amounts and simple relationships. The COBie project bridges the gap in interpretation by identifying the similarities in the process that contractors, operators, maintainers & asset managers use to accomplish daily activities.
What COBie does: As an information exchange standard, it has capabilities of everything from planning, vdesign, construction, commissioning all the way to operations, maintenance & management of spaces. It simply changes the required deliverable from paper documents to electronic formats, facilitating building information interchange.
“If you use COBie in a way which violates the COBie specification you are no longer meeting it’s requirement. You are doing something else that is not COBie” – Bill East, Inventor of COBie
Here is the data flow in COBie:
Compiled and edited by Shantha Priya S.
Leave a Reply