Long term preservation of BIM models

[stefan]

Within the context of my academic research, I am working on collecting information and good practices considering strategies of preserving BIM models for the future.

These are the problems:

• architectural projects last longer than the current product release cycles of 12 to 18 months.
• compatibility between application versions is limited: e.g. you can open an r11 file into r12, but the library throws issues. You might load the r11 migration library alongside the regular r12 library, but what do you do when r13 is released?
• how far can you go back? e.g. see http://www.archicadwiki.com/ArchiCAD%20versions
  How does that work with libraries? Are archives usable in the long run? Can you properly load an r8.1 library in r12? And what happens the year after when r13 is released?
• In how far are people concerned with the closed nature of the file format? Everything you created is in an undocumented format, only readable by a proprietary application?
  Should you store complementary archive copies using Open formats, such as VRML and IFC?
• Do you think having old PC's, with old versions of the OS and the CAD software might solve this? They will break down eventually and the old ArchiCAD software required another dongle, which you have delivered a long time ago to Graphisoft already, in return for a USB WIBU key.
  Or virtualization? Virtual MS Windows with Windows NT or 2000 and an old ArchiCAD r6? And what about Macs? OS 8.6 inside the "Classic Environment" or in an emulation? I don't see "Classic" anymore on my iMac with Leopard. And surely there is no old Apple Bus connection (but I don't have the old dongle either). What happens when USB is replaced with something else? Firewire, parallel ports, serial ports etc... are already mostly gone these days.

Thank you for any feedback.

Remember: today, we can read stone engravings of thousands of years ago and paper documents of several hundred years old, but who can correctly read a CAD document from 10 years ago?

[Anonymous]

stefan wrote:
....
The migration from BIM models (from ANY application) between versions is problematic, to say the least.

And I strongly urge the Software Developers to take this as a task to solve in the (near) future.

What is the use of convincing everybody in the building industry of the virtues of BIM, if we don't consider the whole potential lifecycle of the model, far beyond the design-build stage.

Your last thought suggests something we wrote (and unpacked) for a client some years ago: "Managing the model is managing the building."

This was not subtle: it simply reflected the small insight that the model is essentially an avatar for the building, and as BIM software capabilities and hardware improve, the avatar will become more sophisticated and the correspondence between the building and the model will become more "thorough."

So I completely agree with Stefan: If we are to effectively manage & model the whole building-life-cycle, then we must certainly manage "the whole model-life-cycle."

Didrik