Standards Development

Scope

This document specifies a methodology for organizing and managing construction documents within common data environment (CDE) with the aim of optimizing information traceability and utilization efficiency throughout built asset lifecycles.

This document provides rules on the aspects that are critical for organizing construction documents to enhance collaboration of project/asset stakeholders based on documentation.

Purpose

Background

With the development of the digitalization in built environment, common data environments (CDEs) play the critical role for projects and assets information management when using BIM. ISO 19650 defines CDEs are agreed information source that collect, manage disseminate information containers through managed processes. While this International Standard series also provides principles and basic requirements, including CDE solution architectures and workflow requirements, but there still lacks specific, actionable and standardized guidance on the organization, association, and discovery mechanisms of massive information containers and documents within the CDE. As a result, in practice, all parties involved in the project/asset face significant challenges such as inefficient information search, disconnection between data and files, and loss of semantic relationships due to the lack of a unified methodology.

To today, and for the foreseeable future, documents remain a vital form of information representation in CDEs, especially at the human-facing interfaces where vast amounts of information are transmitted as documents.

Challenges

The industry’s current pain point lies precisely in ineffective management. When confronted with massive volumes of documents, users lack efficient tools to swiftly locate which specific document contains the needed information. BIM complicates the situation due to higher level of documents integration. Within built environment, documents carry the most part of information which are exchanged among the stakeholders or storage as archived records for legal purposes. Such functions lead the following challenges for document management:

• The vast number of documents required to manage complex projects/assets makes it difficult to rapidly locate relevant information. Industry studies indicate that over 150,000 documents may be generated during the construction phase of a small airport project.

• Large volumes of documents originate from diverse sources including owners, designers, contractors, subcontractors, and product suppliers. Moreover, these documents have to be shared across organizational boundaries among project stakeholders — critically, document consumers often differ from their creators.

• Serving multiple disciplines and applications, the documents are constructed in diverse forms based on their presentation methods, e.g., drawings, information models, specifications, videos. These forms are designed to contain appropriate information and usually complementing or verifying to each other.

• A long-term document life cycle is critical for the built environment, as the construction assets always span longer periods of time. The difficulties can be imagined if the documents lack standardized organization. At least an explicit approach of versioning is necessary.

• Human-Machine Interaction shall be considered. The documents shall be human-friendly organized and require that all approaches can lead to rapid and accurate human comprehension, while simultaneously maintaining machine-processable capability.

Purposes of the proposal

Given the challenges above one or more standards are needed to clarify how the construction documents should be organized under the consideration of CDE functions, which may include the following aspects:

• comprehensively addressing the complexity of multiple phases/tasks, multi-stakeholder involvement, and diverse information sources within a single project/asset;

• fully incorporating construction industry characteristics by capturing sufficient and specific metadata — particularly accommodating specialized document types like BIM information models and technical drawings;

• constructing document dependencies and correlations to adequately describe information network regarding project/asset attributes and operations, thereby enabling the CDE to serve as the single source of truth;

• implementing document-centric information management within CDEs, including security-minded management and risk management;

• facilitating the data resources, such as libraries, referenced projects, etc, to be used for information processing in the CDEs.

The proposal can enable better alignment the organization of documents in CDEs for a given project/asset, facilitating data exchange, particularly beneficial for information management in crossregion/industry projects/assets. Specifically, the essential purposes of the standard(s) lie in:

• providing unambiguous document organization methodologies for CDE establishment and usage, enabling data consumers to efficiently and accurately locate the data, while obtaining sufficient information to meet the requirements. Here referred to as findability and perceptibility.

• enhancing data interoperability between CDEs through consistent approaches given by the standard (s), regarding that the CDEs are established and maintained by various software vendors or project/asset stakeholders.

• clarifying the definition and rules governing relationships among documents and between documents and information containers to establish relationality, to enable CDEs to function as comprehensive data sources within the context of project/asset in built environment.

• Enhancing standards adoptability by ensuring comprehensive and rational integration of international standards (e.g., IEC 82045, ISO 81346-12) within CDE ecosystems.

Expected future parts for the organization of construction documents

Part 2: Graphic symbols for kind of documents

Part 3: Data exchange