Title: Federation Strategy of Building Information Models for better Management of Construction Projects

Biography:

Mostafa Elashmawy is Senior BIM & GIS Manager at WSP Middle East, working for Project Management Services Business Unit providing Digital Delivery Management for some of the most significant construction projects in the Middle East. Mostafa was graduated as a Civil/Structural engineer and worked as a coordinator for other disciplines. Hence, he has in-depth knowledge of Architectural, Landscape, and MEP works, which helped him work as a global BIM Manager. He worked at many of the most significant construction projects in the Middle East during the last ten years delivering, coordinating, and managing BIM, GIS, CAD deliverables. Mostafa has a Master’s Degree in Global BIM Management and is certified in Information Management by many respectful organisations. He also has a deep academic knowledge of International Standards, Methods, and Procedures related to Information Management. He uses his knowledge and experience to implement BIM and provide digitisation strategies for his organisation and clients.

Abstract

Federation Strategy (Formerly: Volume Strategy) forms one of the essential sections while creating a BIM Execution Plan (BEP). Paying good attention and spending efforts on detailing it results in better management of Building Information Models throughout the lifecycle of construction projects. As per International Standards ISO 19650, many aspects need to be considered while segregating BIM models. Firstly, you need to have separate models for each asset and sub-assets in your project. For example, if you have 20 buildings in your project, each should have different models. Secondly, you need to think about the disciplines. So, for each building, you need to have a model for the architecture, structure, Mechanical, etc. However, you may also segregate each discipline into sub-disciplines. For example, you may have concrete structure models and steel structure models. The third aspect is the Task Teams (Whether they are sub-consultants, sub-contractors, or even inhouse teams under the same organisation). This aspect may affect the previous segregations as sometimes you will have different groups modelling parts of the same discipline of the same building. Imagine having a Facade consultant who will be providing their architectural models. The Fourth item to be considered is the level of confidentiality of information. Elements that will have confidential information should be modelled and stored separately. In general, models shall be segregated based on the information’s permissions. The Fifth step is to think about the expected size of your models and slice it based on that. Not only the native file sizes but also the to-beexported formats like .ifc. However, sometimes it’s acceptable that further segregations be done at the model development stage if the size exceeds an agreed size. It would help to leave some vacant file numbers whenever you have additional segregation needed. And that takes us to the final step; Naming Convention. Proper Naming Convention should be used so that the file name/number should reflect the above segregations. It’s also necessary to provide a federated model that combines every segregated group by linking/appending. These federated models are federated layer by layer until you reach the Master federated model for your whole scope of work. Prepare a hierarchy diagram to illustrate this federation so that everybody can understand the relation between models. You need to understand that the purpose of this strategy is to support information security, ease information exchange using smaller file sizes, and, most importantly, facilitate simultaneous modelling by the various teams without coordination issues. Think about it as a puzzle board or a Soma Cube where every task team will be responsible for their puzzle piece with minimal interference with the neighbouring elements.