NIBS Forms National Building Information Model Standards Committee

By Consulting Specifying Engineer Staff

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The Facility Information Council (FIC) of the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS), Washington, D.C., has formed a committee to create a National Building Information Model Standard (NBIMS).

Building information models (BIMs)—digital, easily managed and shared representations of physical and functional data that define buildings throughout their life cycles—are increasingly seen throughout the public and private real estate and construction sectors as a way to control cost and performance problems associated with inaccurate and incomplete communications.

The NBIMS Committee seeks to facilitate life-cycle building process integration by providing a common model for describing facility information, common views of information based on the needs of businesses engaged in all aspects of facility commerce, and common standards for sharing data between businesses and their data processing applications.

A 2004 National Institute of Standards and Technology study found incompatible information costs the capital facilities industry at least $15.8 billion a year, PDF .
l stages of the building process, from land assembly and project finance through programming, design, and construction, to asset management and maintenance. U.S. government agencies such as the General Services Administration and the Coast Guard are calling for facilities services providers to support virtual building models. Inconsistencies among the several existing open standards and proprietary software standards, however, are seen as limiting BIMs’ potential.

The NBIMS effort targets present and future BIM users in architecture, engineering, construction, real estate, facility management and a host of related fields. Still seeking public and private sector participants, the new NBIMS committee already counts some 26 organizations and businesses as charter co-signers, plus over 80 individual working group members.