The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed in 1999 because two software systems used different unit conventions. Both were computing force, just in different units. No one caught it until the probe was gone. BIM has the same problem, at scale, with one twist. A human colleague can sometimes guess what an ambiguous value means. A computer cannot.
Štefan Jaud contributed Chapter 4.3.3, a guide through the openBIM standards stack for facility management professionals. He works through the openBIM standards one by one: what each does, where it ends and the next begins, and how they connect in a real project. Covered are DIN EN ISO 19650, VDI 2552, IDM (ISO 29481), LOIN (ISO 7817), IFC 4.3 (ISO 16739, including the 2024 infrastructure additions for road, rail, bridge, and tunnel), IDS, MVD, BCF, and bSDD. Štefan contributed directly to the development of several of these at buildingSMART International, which keeps the chapter from being purely descriptive.
The standards are not a list to memorize. They are a workflow: The closing example is a fire door that must satisfy both fire resistance and evacuation requirements. The same door gets traced through every standard: the IDM sets who delivers what and when, IfcDoor and Pset_DoorCommon.FireRating encode the property in IFC, an IDS validates the value, and a BCF issue flags the error when the modeler enters an invalid classification.
About the book
"BIM für Facility Manager" is edited by Stefanie Radek with contributions from Sven Axt, Štefan Jaud, Samuel Klaus, Michael Maaß, Ilka May, Fabian Naethbohm, Frank Schroeder, and Thomas Utermann.
The book is written from the operator's perspective, and that shapes the content throughout. Roughly 99.7% of German building stock is existing buildings, and the book reflects that: the sections on information requirements, CAFM handover, digital twin management, lean transformation, and sustainability all address someone managing a building that is already standing, not a designer on a new-build project.
Available as print and e-book through bSD Verlag and DIN Media.
ISBNs: 978-3-410-38221-8 (DIN Media) / 978-3-910476-55-4 (bSD Verlag)