ABSTRACT
Building design requires an orchestrated team effort in which many actors, tasks and activities have to be coordinated. As different actors use different software tools, each specialist traditionally operates on an island of isolation until the time comes to match and patch with other members of the design team. To accomplish this effectively one needs to be able to execute a wide variety of software applications in an efficient manner. This has led to the need for ‘interoperability’ between software applications. For the last 20 years, a sustained research effort has been devoted to achieving this in the architecture, engineering and construction (A/E/C) industry. This has led to the introduction of incrementally richer versions of a building information model (BIM) that integrates input and output data from different applications.
