AISC develops strategy to move construction forward

by Jonathan McGaha | 13 October 2011 12:00 am

Enter project information once and it will be available and usable to every project team member across any software platform used, saving time and money and improving communication and collaboration? That is the goal of interoperability. The American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) is working to bring that vision to reality by developing a three-step interoperability strategy to evaluate data exchanges and integrate structural steel information into buildingSMART’s Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). IFC is an open and neutral data exchange format that covers multiple disciplines across the construction industry.

AISC has adopted a three-part strategy, outlined as follows:

Short term: Ensure model data can be exchanged as needed by the structural steel industry, regardless of the nature of the exchange or format used.
Medium term: Promote IFC and make the format more accessible and understood by working with buildingSMART, other trade organizations, academia and subject experts.
Long term: Facilitate the development and implementation of IFC to satisfy the needs of the structural steel industry.

This new strategy maintains AISC and the structural steel industry’s leadership in interoperability and ensures that data related to structural steel can be exchanged up and down the supply chain and with other disciplines and trades. AISC holds the view that open standards will never be able to transfer every piece of data a user or client may want, or indeed that two software programs could exchange, . “A combination of open standard and proprietary enhancement will always be state of the art, but the key is to always be raising the quality of data exchanged within the open format,” comments Chris Moor, AISC director of industry initiatives.

More information about the evolution of interoperability and AISC’s novel approach to moving it forward can be found in the Fall 2011 issue of the Journal of Building Information Modeling (JBIM), available for free downloading at http://www.wbdg.org/references/jbim.php[1]. A copy of the article is also available on AISC’s website, here http://aisc.informz.net/z/cjUucD9taT0xODUyMDY4JnA9MSZ1PTEwMTk3NzYyNDMmbGk9ODU5MzgzOA/index.html[2]

Endnotes:

http://www.wbdg.org/references/jbim.php: http://www.wbdg.org/references/jbim.php
http://aisc.informz.net/z/cjUucD9taT0xODUyMDY4JnA9MSZ1PTEwMTk3NzYyNDMmbGk9ODU5MzgzOA/index.html: http://aisc.informz.net/z/cjUucD9taT0xODUyMDY4JnA9MSZ1PTEwMTk3NzYyNDMmbGk9ODU5MzgzOA/index.html

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