There's a great big elephant stomping around in the BIM room. Actually there's a small herd of them, but we'll focus on what is probably the biggest one.
Let's say you have a pump station on campus that needs an overhaul before {pick your own poop joke here}. In this case, managing the facility model is simple enough since the facility is small and the project covers the whole building. The owner sends the existing model off to the designer and contractor and the updated model becomes the new facility model. Nice and neat and not at all dirty.
Too bad the world rarely works that way for facility owners.
On the other hand, let's say you have six million square feet of airport terminal and concourses. At one end of the terminal, you have Joe's Pancake Hut going into a tenant space. Nearby, City Airlines is moving into a recently vacated ticket counter area. At the other end of the Terminal, a new expansion has begun to add capacity. In between them, you have renovations in mechanical spaces to upgrade failing systems. Meanwhile you need to renovate airport office space for the folks who keep the airport running, while TSA also wants a new break room and locker facilities.
All of this is going on with different start dates, end dates, delays, consultants, contractors, project managers and varying levels of quality to the existing As-Built condition. As the multitude of projects proceed, somehow it all gets juggled and managed and kept on track and executed to the owner's exacting design and BIM standards.
However, at some point, each of these projects has to come back in sync with your existing Facility Model, which is also being updated as maintenance chugs along on the building and stakeholders throughout the airport authority ask for exhibits, maps, diagrams, areas, adjacencies and all sorts of other data on existing and future conditions.
Does this even work? For the love of BIM, HOW!?
The answer may lie in a little known, seldom used functionality within Revit. In fact, it's obscure enough that it doesn't even get a mention in the Mastering Revit Architecture books.
Convert Groups to Linked Models
In this post we'll cover the general gist of working with this tool, in a post in the near future I'll go through the more technical steps and things to watch out for.
How it works, for a facility owner, is that you establish the scope of a project within the model. This probably means slicing walls and cutting up floors.
Select all of the content in that scope and create a model group from it. Some content, such as Rooms and Spaces, cannot be placed in a model group, so those will have to be addressed separately.
On the Modify | Model Groups tab>Group panel there is a small Convert to Link icon. Revit then gives you two options, Replace with a New Project File or Replace with an Existing Project File. The first option is the one you want, it creates a new Revit file with just the content from the model group within it.
In your facility model, you'll find that the model group, which had replaced integrated content, has itself been replaced by a Linked Model.
When you open the new Revit file, you'll find only what was in the model group, so you will need to Transfer Project Standards from a fresh file and copy in your base family content.
Send the file off to your consultant. As they do their work, you can update the link in your base facility model with their project model. If you have multiple projects going on in your facility, you can see how they are integrated over time via mapping each project to a phase in the facility model.
The content in that area being a link tells anyone who goes to use the Revit model that the area in question is effectively off-limits and they need to coordinate with the project team if they are going to change anything.
When the project is complete, use the Bind Link tool to integrate the project model back into the Facility Model. You're then left with a whole, current, living Facility Model. In fact, during the entire process, you never stop having a living Facility Model.
