buildingSMART Strategic Roadmap
Strategic Roadmap
The Strategic Roadmap for buildingSMART
The vision of buildingSMART is the seamless exchange of trusted information across the built environment. This vision is central to solving arguably the two most significant challenges facing the global built environment, namely how to improve productivity and sustainability in both construction and asset operations.
Addressing these challenges demands both optimised decision-making and increased automation across the project lifecycle. In turn, this requires the ability to fuse together project data from all sources to create comprehensive and trusted information – in a machine-interpretable format – and to retain and build on this information throughout the life of the project. buildingSMART establishes the open digital standards and services that allows this to happen.
These Roadmaps are living documents and the latest iteration of the Strategic Roadmap is described below.
The Strategic Roadmap recognises three distinct phases in the evolution of our standards and services:
- Foundations: open standards are already available for the industry, and they play key role in supporting the adoption and use of these standards globally;
- Improvements: by evolving these standards and introducing supporting services, bSI is making it easier for users to adopt and maximise the benefits of open digital workflows; and
- Reinventions: for the longer term, bSI is developing the next generation of standards and services, which will harness and unlock the impact of future technology trends.
The benefits of each of these phases can be described in technological, operational and business terms, as below.
Vision
Phase
Foundations
Improvements
Reinventions
Aims
➀ Consistent data communication standards
➁ Automated connectivity between applications
➂ Ecosystem with seamless integrated decision support
Business
... resulting in
Improved data integration in design, construction and asset management reduces risk and rework, saving time and cost
Enhanced analysis allows better decision-making on design, construction and asset management trade-offs, improving time, cost and quality
Intelligent design, construction and asset management ecosystem allows optimisation of decision making across the asset lifecycle, improving time, cost and quality
Operational
... leading to ...
openBIM workflows enable rule-checking and interoperability between applications, helping data integration during design, construction, asset management & decommissioning
Standards, services and software applications are connected, allowing design, construction and asset management predictions through automated simulations
An open and automated, seamless, intelligent ecosystem, allowing semi-automated design and decision-making, spanning different systems and all lifecycle phases
Technical
what we need to create ...
Common data exchanges enable interoperability between applications, model federation and digital workflows (e.g. via rule checking)
Connected applications enable process automation, simulations, automated checking & decision support (e.g. automated scheduling, lifecycle costings, code compliance, manufacturing engineering, energy modelling)
Integrated processes with linked data and predictive analytics enable support for intelligent digital twin ecosystems (e.g. automatic predictions of design/engineering changes through connected simulations)
The community is working concurrently on all three of these phases. However, the output of this work will become available progressively, targeting the dates depicted in the following Summary slide. The dates denote the earliest point at which a new standard or service should be available for adoption by the community, after which widespread adoption should be expected to take several years. For this reason, earlier standards will still remain valid and valuable even after the release of new standards.
Strategic Roadmap Summary
Likewise, these standards and services will in turn unlock innovation and development within industry. An important example of this is the role played by the evolving buildingSMART standards in enabling the parallel development by industry of Digital Twins capabilities.
The Roadmap contains a further level of detail as to the content of each step up in capability which we expect to see over the coming years, as set out in the following two slides.
User Adoption Balance
This multi-speed adoption pattern is represented in the following chart, showing the expected overlap in the use of different generations of standards and services, albeit with a progressive migration over time towards newer and more capable standards and services.
As a community, buildingSMART must run ahead of these trends, and progressively rebalance efforts toward preparing the future standards and services, as shown in the next slide.
The Roadmap contains a further level of detail as to the content of each step up in capability which bSI expects to see over the coming years, as set out in the following diagram.
Solutions
These capability steps can also be depicted in the following Dependencies chart.
You can download a copy of the Strategic Roadmap presentation here.
As noted above, delivery of the Strategic Roadmap is achieved through a combination of the central Technical and Compliance Roadmaps and the work of the ten sector-based buildingSMART Domains.
Each Domain has its own roadmap and a series of specific ‘Domain Projects’, which are agreed upon and funded by participating members of that Domain. Details on these Domain activities and how to get involved can be found in the links.
Likewise, the Technical Roadmap and the Compliance Roadmap require the delivery of a number of ‘Strategic Projects’, whose completion also depends on funding by the community.