BIM OBJECTS LIBRARY FOR INFORMATION EXCHANGE IN PUBLIC WORKS: THE USE OF PROPRIETARY AND OPEN FORMATS

Abstract

The Italian code of public procurement states that interoperability via open formats is essential for the exchange of information between public organizations and their project partners. However, the understanding of what interoperability means and the use of open formats in the current practice is still limited. Moreover, one of the approaches that a public organization can adopt to share its information requirements among project partners is via parametric objects, such as BIM families. This approach is not commonly adopted, it is very time consuming, but it allows the integration of the client’s requirements directly into the project. This paper aims at investigating whether a BIM objects library can be the solution to facilitate the interoperability in information exchange between public organizations and their project partners. The paper shows a parallelism between the use of the proprietary and the open format when using BIM objects in a project environment comparing the open and the proprietary format of a BIM object library in terms of interoperability. This research refers to a case study consisting of the development of a BIM objects library for a public organization in Italy. The results shows that both proprietary and open formats are an efficient solution when developing a BIM library for a public organization. However, their usefulness depends on the way the public organization choose to organize its own BIM adoption.