Entrant details
Role or Job Title on the Project
CEO
Employer
Employer Role
Technology or Software Development Company
Are you or your employer a member of buildingSMART?
Yes - Chapter Member
Submission details
Submitting Party Company Name
Singular AG
Submitting Party Company Location
Zürich, Switzerland
Submitting Party Role on Project
BIM Quality Assurance Software
Submitting Party Company Website
Full Project Name
Singular Qualifier
Project Location (Country)
Switzerland
Project Objectives
The Singular Qualifier is the firewall between building owners and model producers. It performs automatic quality assurance according to guidelines set by the owners and gives modelers clear instructions on what needs to be fixed.
Detailed process:
- As a building owner, you set up the BIM requirements for your project in the Singular Qualifier
- You invite modelers to your project
- Modelers can then upload their models as IFC and get a quality score. As long as this score doesn't reach 100%, they can download the BCF and fix the model.
- Once the model reaches 100%, the model is unlocked.
openBIM Achievements
The usage of openBIM in the Singular Qualifier allows:
- To clearly document and exchange information requirements (IDM and/or MVD)
- To check models from most authoring softwares (IFC)
- Model authors to fix errors directly in their software of choice (BCF)
- To easily localize any classification (bsDD - WIP)
openBIM used
IFC 2x3, IFC4, ifcXML, ifcOWL, bSDD, BCF, IDM, MVD, mvdXML, COBie
Software used
The Singular Qualifier core business logic and IFC graphing is programmed in house.
Strategic Alignment
We want to enable owners and BIM managers / coordinators to be able to focus on their core business rather than having to check if the models they have ordered are compliant to their requirements. openBIM helped us to do so since using open formats means making the software usable by almost anyone. We act as a firewall between modelers and building owners.
Highlights
- Already dozens of clients during the beta phase
- Diverse users, spanning from owners to architects
- Created an in-house graph representation of IFC files in order to perform faster checks
- Grew the team from 3 to 13 people within a year
Project Website
Project and Stakeholder Logos (compiled into one .ppt/pptx file for upload)
Project Address
Wasserwerkstrasse 129
8037 Zürich
Switzerland
Project Type
(Other)
Size of Project
Since we are a BIM software development startup, we have dozens of clients with several projects.
Some more insights about the projects we work on and our company:
- Project types: Healthcare, education, commercial, residential & civil.
- Turnover: Singular had a turnover of over 500k CHF last year.
- Team: we grew from 3 to 13 employees within a year.
Generally speaking, the Singular Qualifier works on projects of any size.
Detailed description of the project
Singular has developed a new process to achieve higher information quality in BIM projects in a mostly automated manner.
At its core, the Singular Qualifier is a web tool that leverages openBIM technologies in order to check models according to requirements. It serves as both a requirement definition tool for buidling owners and a quality gate between the owners and modelers.
History
The company originated from a research project that showed that the quality of BIM models is essential for any sort of use case. Bad model quality not only reduces trust in BIM processes, but can also degrade or even condition the success of any given use case. Unfortunately, checking model quality manually is a time consuming process and sometimes also doesn't leverage the full power of openBIM, but relies on proprietary formats instead.
We also believe that openBIM standards should be used right from the start in order to allow collaboration that is more transparent and open, thus more effective. A first protoype using the IFC format was thus built. It would allow simple information checks on IFC models and their attributes.
The Most Viable Product being launched and validated, Singular became a company.
Nowadays
The Singular Qualifier is now in its beta phase and has evolved to a more comprehensive tool that enables requirements definition and automatic quality assurance of models according to that definition. Uploading models is always done using IFC. One of the core features of the software is to enable modelers to correct mistakes in their models without the need for human interaction that would provide this feedback. The modeler can simply download a BCF file from the Qualifier and open it in his/her favorite authoring software in order to proceed to corrections.
Future
We have the vision of supporting openBIM throughout our whole software in order to add real value at every stage of the process.
A picture being worth a thousand words, this vision is represented in the software diagram attached to this submission. In a nutshell, in addition to the current usage of IFC and BCF, we plan on supporting IDM, MVD, and COBie within other features of the software.
To sum it all up, the ultimate goal of the Singular Qualifier is to ease up the usage of BIM as much as possible. Aligning with the mission of buildingSMART is thus natural since using open, transparent, and effective standards is the only way to move forward and to construct buildings in the most efficient manner. Our software would not exist if it wasn't for open and collaborative standards. A very pragmatic example: we could not develop a model qualifying engine for each individual authoring software; let along parse proprietary formats in the first place. Further, we always try to work based on use-cases. Most of these use-cases require deep collaboration between the many stakeholders and information providers that are present in everty typical construction project. This collaboration can only be possible if there is an actual way to exchange data in a standardized manner.
Detailed description of openBIM on the project
The easiest way to describe the usage of openBIM is to analyse each step of the usage of our software. Some of the following are part of our roadmap while others are already up and running:
- Requirement definition: the Singular Qualifier supports you in defining the information requirements for your project. For now, this mostly serves to get a high-level overview of what needs to be delivered (and of course to perform quality checks in later stages). Making those requirements easily shareable is the next logical step and we believe that MVD is a good format to do so. It suits the use-case approach that we are trying to follow in everything we do.
- Model information checking: the only way to cover models authored by all the possible softwares in the AEC industry is to use a common standard. IFC is perfect for that and is central to our product since the very start. We are now working on also supporting IFC4, before even thinking of proprietary or closed formats.
- Classification: different projects use different classifications depending on company standards, intended use-cases, and local best-practices. This has been difficult to accomodate for at certain times, but was still manageable for now. In the future and in order to be able to scale efficiently, we plan on making use of bSDD. This will allow to set a common standard understandable by everybody and will also ease up international collaboration on projects that need it.
Software ecosystem map
openBIM Supporting Evidence
Benefits from using openBIM
- Our software could not or hardly exist if we had to accomodate for all vendor-specific formats. IFC is the best format to use for us.
- The usage of BCF as an error-feedback tool allows model authors to fix mistakes directly in their everyday software.
- The growing IFC support from third-party libraries speeds and eases up development a lot.
- Using openBIM also helps in following standard processes that can be understood and used by all. Sharing requirments is a goop example.
- Reasoning in use-cases is central in everything we do. This matches very well with the overall philosophy of openBIM and IDM.
"We were able to innovate using openBIM."
Innovation is the main aim of our project. We want to open up the silo of classical and dry model quality checking and provide assistance in the whole process instead. We do that by being use-case oriented, just as openBIM is. In this regard, openBIM helped us by:
- Providing an "mental framework" of the main steps of any BIM process
- Enabling the development of tools and third-party libraries that we were able to use in order to develop our software
- Enabling deliverables of our software to be used by anyone, the best example being BCF in order to correct faulty models
"We were able to identify where we need openBIM to develop further."
We believe that openBIM needs to be developed and supported for two main reasons:
- It enables project collaboration to be more transparent and easy. Standards also help to reuse some work that has already be done on several projects.
- openBIM is the only way of being able to improve software and third-party libraries that can in turn be used to create tools that support the AEC industry, thus closing the loop. More openBIM usage equals more software developed equals more efficient workflows using openBIM.
While we are already using several openBIM technologies, we have several roadmap initiatives that will need openBIM to be implemented. One of the most important ones being the requirements definition and the usage of MVD and IDM. Depending on the use case of some end users, we will also need to work with MVD and COBie in order to deliver more precise insights into some models that have already been validated.
In a broader sense, we believe in open collaboration and knowledge exchange. That's why we try to use and support open-source projects as much as possible. Further and despite our company being primarly a software development company, many members of our team have a background in AEC and BIM. That's why we know that the problem of BIM-adoption in the industry is far from being solely related to the simple usage of software. We try to help solve this problem not only by developing software, but also by sharing our techincal and industrial knowledge through pragmatic content. We have just started doing this but we plan on publishing a lot of content about common BIM problems (technical, organizational, or both), and ideally a platform to exchange about it.
Last but not least, we are active within Bauen digital Schweiz (Swiss BuildingSMART chapter) and try to maintain a tight collaboration with all the members we are connected with in order to further push openBIM standards to be used in Switzerland.
BIM Uses were defined on the project
I agree to be contacted about the project BIM uses outside of this awards program.
Stakeholders
Singular AG, Zurich, Switzerland,
https://snglr.com, Software Development, Julian Amann
