The life-cycle of a building artefact consists of five main phases: ‘require’, ‘design’, ‘build’, ‘operate, manage & maintain’ and ‘renovate or demolish/recycle’). Many stakeholders have to cooperate during these phases. For matters like managing, drawing/modelling, calculating and simulating these players typically use different software, which does not exactly support information exchange, sharing and reuse. The consequences? Failure costs, exceeding deadlines and buildings and infrastructures that do not comply with the requirements of the client. TNO has many years of experience in the field of ICT integration and the related Building Information Models (BIM). Complex stuff for which TNO is able to provide clarity and transparency as an independent partner in the development and application of relevant open standards. We advise authorities, clients, building partners and software vendors in the area of open and smart ICT integration solutions.

Benefits

The right integration of software offers the end-user many advantages:

• More reuse of knowledge;
• Fewer non-productive hours;
• Reduced failure costs;
• Shorter process times;
• Better decisions due to consideration of more alternative solutions with associated consequences in the same timeframe;
• Use of the best solutions of different software vendors openly integrated, both now and in the future.

Furthermore, the TNO approach is the ‘engine’ for many innovative building concepts and processes like partnering, performance-based contracts, consumer-oriented construction, industrial construction, virtual construction etc.

Technology

Under the hood we use various technologies such as the ‘ISO Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data’ and the ‘Semantic Web’ of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as well as models and structures (schemas, ontologies and object libraries) based on these technologies. A good example are the ‘Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)’ of the international BuildingSmart organisation. TNO has developed the ‘IFC Engine Series’ software used by various software vendors to make their solutions compatible with IFC. In this respect, TNO has also started the initiative for an Open Source BIMserver. For further information, just contact us. For examples of projects, see cases.