Tekla Structures and COBie

COBie, Construction Operations Building Information Exchange, is a non-proprietary data format for the publication of a subset of building information models (BIM) focused on delivering asset data as distinct from geometric information.

But what does that mean?

Basically it is a rule-based data exchange format to allow design and construction teams to share information with facilities management teams. This is the most important point – whilst any information can be shared using this format the primarily purpose is to share information that will be of use to Operation and Maintenance teams.

COBie was developed in the USA, with a pilot standard created in 2007 and an approved standard published in 2011 as part of the National Building Information Model (NBIMS-US) standard. In the UK the Government first outlined its requirement for COBie in its BIM Strategy paper published in March 2011, see link below.

What is COBie? 01 September 2011, by Dr Stephen Hamil

The use of COBie in the UK is formally described in the Code of Practice "BS 1192-4:2014 Collaborative production of information Part 4: Fulfilling employer’s information exchange requirements using COBie – Code of practice"

The development of COBie has been predominantly in the buildings sector however COBie for infrastructure is now being developed too.

At a technical level COBie is a sub-set of IFC, Industry Foundation Class. This is an international open standard for data exchange, both graphical and non-graphical. IFC is managed by an organisation called buildingSMART.  This means that is possible define and extract COBie data from within the IFC format when working collaboratively on projects. Another way to describe this is that COBie is a MVD, a Model View Definition, of IFC.

In PAS 1192-2:2013 "Specification for information management for the capital/delivery phase of construction projects using building information modelling", one of the most important UK BIM standards, it notes that the COBie exchange standard is both a "key requirement" and part of the "fundamental principles for Level 2 information requirements".

Referring back to Section 1 the reason to use COBie is to exchange non-graphical data that is useful or required by the Operations and Management team. This is the key point – data that is useful to O&M teams. In the main structural information is not required as there is little or no maintenance requirements to these elements of an asset.

If any specific COBie data is required by an Employer then it should be described using the workflows outlined in Figure 4 of PAS 1192-3:2014



Figure 4 outlines that, through the definition of Organisational Information Requirements (OIRs), Asset Information Requirements (AIRs) are generated. These in turn inform the Employer's Information Requirements (EIRs) which should be written in a plain language form that is understandable to all parties and can be easily checked, verified and validated through the BIM processes. The COBie information required will then be embedded or linked to the Project Information Model (PIM) before ultimately being exchanged as COBie data at handover when the relevant parts of the PIM are transferred to the Asset Information Model (AIM).

Tekla has always had the philosophy that its models should be accessible to all, and is a global member of buildingSMART. Tekla fully supports the use of the IFC format and the use of COBie data exchanges. Tekla Structures software is certified by buildingSMART for both the import and export of IFC. This gives both those who create or receive models developed in Tekla Structures the ability to view COBie data embedded in the model with the standard configuration of the software.

Where specific data exchanges for COBie are not automated in the Tekla Structures software it is possible to create custom COBie fields within Tekla Structures to share the data defined specifically on a project. However, as noted in Section 2, in principle structural data does not need to be exchanged using COBie. The graphical data is generally more important for structural BIM workflows and so Tekla recommend that the exchange format is IFC.

To go back to the original question – how would a Tekla customer answer the question “Does the business have a documented process for producing COBie containers?” A suggested response may look something like this:

To date insert your company name here have not been asked to produce COBie data. This is because COBie data is normally shared so that Facilities Management teams have the right information for maintaining an asset. Since (for example) precast concrete elements do not need to be maintained the need for COBie data is not required.

If a specific need for the creation of COBie data should arise on a project we know that any data can be applied to our models, through the use of agreed User Defined Attributes, to our Tekla Structures models.