First glance at BIMreview 1.0 from Avatech Solutions

BCF files (BIM Checker Files) can comprise a list of checks to be performed against selected files, for an ultimate purpose in mind.  For example, you may need to send out your architectural model for energy analysis, so to ensure that it is suitable for this purpose, you would want to be sure that some basic requirements have been met:

• There are no rooms without boundaries
• There are no rooms within rooms
• Rooms have upper limits defined by levels or geometry (not default values)
• Room volumes are being calculated (this is not the case by default)

Moreover, you may decide that some rooms should be excluded from the check because they will be excluded from the energy analysis to follow.  These can be filtered out from the check if they are not required.
Each check results in a pass or fail, as determined by criteria which is defined within each check file.  A Pass or Fail message to the user can accompany the result.

You can configure checks for compliance with your BIM annotation standards.  For example, you might wish to check that only certain families, dimension styles or text styles have been used, or that your text is capitalized.  This is not dissimilar to what has been around in the CAD world for many years, but is cosmetic and ultimately trivial when compared against what it can help you determine from the model geometry.

Many element types can be assessed, though there remain some restrictions on what can be checked.  In some cases, this is due to API restrictions, which prohibit the programmatic access to the elements.  In others, it's simply a question of imagination - i.e. that perhaps a given check has not been attempted yet.

Being able to recursively audit and take remedial action inside families should be possible with the recent changes to the Revit API in the 2010 release.  Ensuring consistent naming/use of schedulable parameters would be a start, not to mention pushing standards belatedly into old content!  We'll have to wait a little further to see where and how BIMreview approaches this kind of potential.

The ability to check view template settings would also be good, but according to one member of the BIMreview development team, View Templates are not actually stored by Revit within the main project database, so is restricted by the API at this point.

The results of each check may be saved, printed or emailed as an HTML report.  Effective communication of this information is critical for this tool to be able to increase users’ productivity.

Over time, if reports are acted upon by members of the modelling team, their practices should improve, as they become familiar with what problems will be detected.

Some checks are not yet possible, but based on what's already evident, cannot be far away.  For example, checking that all components of a designated type (e.g. furniture, casework, equipment) are found within a room.  In this way, you could be sure that (perhaps after checking your project's rooms), no such elements were outside of the building and skewing counts within associated schedules.  Similarly, checking that various element types only exist on designated worksets would also be clever.

Added customizability of the check results might lead to other useful outcomes.  The formatting limitations of schedules in Revit have so far precluded report-style formatting of information such as Room Data Sheets.  As a result, these have typically been created via the use of external output to ODBC databases or API interrogation.  However, perhaps by using BIMreview, users could configure the format of a check result in such a way as to negate the need for ODBC exports.

Other regulatory checks not currently possible are likely to become easier in time.  Ensuring that the egress path from any point in the model is less than a maximum distance is one example; minimum clearances and head heights, another.  Perhaps checking that lengths of brick or block walls subscribe to a modular length will soon be possible.  In this version, checks are a little limited on the relationships between various objects, and the same is true within the model itself.  The ability to which we can interrogate programmatically (compared to visually, when working in the model), is determined by what lies beneath - that is, the code.

As the technology improves, so will the information we can glean from our models.  Better simulations and tests will yield better and faster answers to the questions that concern us.

Support is available at http://www.avatech.com/forums.  You can also get assistance via email and phone support.

You can elect to purchase a maintenance subscription (US$250), which provides you with new product releases, updates and industry standards for checking as they become available.

Overall, this product is extremely promising.  The team at Avatech have recognized a need within the marketplace and responded.  Despite some parts of the program being perhaps a little 'young', it is early days for BIM, and even moreso for this product.  Some say that 'the proof is in the pudding'.  Based on that, this program is like a very good (but young) food critic, who can help you understand how to improve your dish.  As the critic matures, and becomes more articulate, so the program should develop and become even more powerful and informative.

*This feature is forthcoming in next release, although currently it is possible to copy and paste the checks from a .bcf file using an XML editor or web page.

In the quest for ‘model integrity’, this tool really does begin to offer the kind of stuff we need.  The ability to hold people to account and to ensure the model works as desired, is of increasing importance to the intra- or inter-discipline collaborative workflow.

Engaging in cyclical improvement can be rewarding, and this tool offers one way to achieve this by collating hard data and metrics on a Building Information Model.  By re-submitting these results back to the project teams, future projects should continually benefit.

Avatech have a roadmap for the next four releases, so it’s clear that there is still much scope for development of the  product.  It is only v1.0, but based on the tool’s usefulness and potential application demonstrated thus far, it's easy to feel enthusiastic about the next version!

For more information, visit BIMreview's home page at http://www.avatech.com/commerce/BIMreview-10-P1.aspx.  All prices quoted are correct at the time of writing.