ARCHICAD Is COBie Compliant

The inventor of COBie, Bill East, has been working with Rob Jackson, associate director of Bond Bryan Architects, to simulate the early design in ARCHICAD of one of four dormitories on a fictitious site adjacent to the University of Illinois in Champaign, Ill. The goal is to create a reference COBie test project.

As the design developed, the COBie Plugin for BIMserver.org was iteratively applied to resolve identified issues. In some cases, these issues were the result of modeling. Other issues required direct feedback with ARCHICAD programmers. This communication was extremely helpful, efficient, and resulted in several software change tickets for which workarounds were applied for this project. According to East, “The results of this experiment demonstrated 100 percent compliance with ARCHICAD against NBIMS-US V3, Design Stage COBie requirements.”

To show how 100 percent COBie compliance was achieved, East and Jackson are currently finishing a book that provides step-by-step instructions. The book is expected to be published in 2016. Following that, the two are looking to move beyond COBie at Early Design by engaging an MEP firm to help them develop and merge COBie-compliant HVAC, plumbing and electrical designs.

For more information about the COBie reference test project, please visit Praire Sky Consulting’s Testing page.

For the “COBie Guide” to the various ARCHICAD versions, please visit GRAPHISOFT’s Downloads page.