AR-5 Early Design

Business needs:

The desired project goals, expressed during architectural programming as requirements and design criteria, are a primary motivation for down-stream design decision-making. Owners, large organizations especially, currently expend a great deal of resources to document their requirements and criteria in a non-computational format therefore rendering limited utility for computational support. Requirement specifications provide the context for most subsequent decisions, but current applications are limited by a lack of access to these requirements and therefore early design information referencing remains a time consuming manual process. Owners also need a way to compare the desirability of alternative proposed solutions in light of their desired objectives and to also track compliance. In addition, early design geometric concepts need to be considered as they are closely tied to functional requirements and, secondly, have much lower levels of detail and different geometric requirements than current CAD and design software support.

Solution:

A description of the early design process will be generated from which information flow and appropriate data structures will be developed to support the unique software requirements that satisfy the objectives outlined in the four previous considerations. The proposed IFC extension will take into consideration the "looseness" or variability required during the Early Design stages, and propose a method that considers Targets, Limits, Ranges, and Derived values for criteria specification rather than just attribute to value equality assignments. For example, rather than stating that the area of a space is equal to X, the standard needs to provide a means of expressing something like "the area of the space should be at least, but no less than the desired occupancy capacity*10".

The results of this project should be compatible with, but not overlap, existing classes. It should explicitly identify links from Early Design objects to existing classes to enable the tracking of project goals from initial owner requirements through design development, material selection, specification and procurement, construction scheduling, and operations and maintenance. In this regard current work by the PM-3 project on extended property sets might be important to convey requirements. The project will work closely on integrating concepts with proposed new IAI-FM project "Portfolio and Asset Management: Performance Requirements" (PAMPeR). The project will also be coordinated with ISO efforts as well as CIB's "Performance Based Building" program

Scope of work:

In Scope:

This proposed project will provide IFC capabilities to support early design processes starting from the interpretation of high level performance based requirements (to be provided by the PAMPeR project FM-9) through intermediate processes to hand-off to detailed design development. The intent is to be able to document requirements and early design decisions in a way that will make this information available in interoperable form to detailed design and subsequent processes in the project life cycle and to enable their tracking. Specifically, the project will:

Identify and define the information objects that are used by owners and users to define what is required during the early design phase and to assess whether what is required has been provided in subsequent project phases. Performance requirements will be defined at a technical level, including: Size of space envelopes; special spaces; group proximities/separations; budget; technical requirements etc. Other project criteria will be documented.

Develop IFC support for the following the four primary areas of consideration based on the requirements and criteria defined above:
- Refine ways to express the concept of building and space functions (as in classifications approaches such OCCS and others)
- Spatial programming
- Design Criteria specification
- Early design geometric representations. (blocking and stacking; bubble diagram)

Will include all building services normally expected in the building model.

Out-of scope:

Project team
*Project leader*	Chapter	Roles	Contact email
Francois Grobler	NA	G	Francois.Grobler@erdc.usace.army.mil
*Technical leader*	Chapter	Roles	Contact email
Susan Presser	NA	G	s-presser@cecer.army.mil
*Alternate technical leader*
Steve Race	UK	I	darcyrace@dial.pipex.com
*Participants*	Chapter	Roles	Contact email
Lamar Henderson	NA	I	lamar43@earthlink.net
Robert Clarke	NA	G	ClarkeRE@state.gov
Van Woods	NA	G	v-woods@cecer.army.mil

Project addresses

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Remarks

THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN INTEGRATED INTO IFC2x2 addendum 1 (Release July 2004)

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