Controlling and sharing information are key issues for the construction industry which must nowadays cope with major changes in the art, such as the project complexity, the eco-design development and new types of partnerships between actors (PPP, Concessions), the obligation to manage risks (anticipation, identification, evaluation, distribution) or the development of BIM (Building Information Modelling). Drawings, notes and records, files have shown their limits .The change to introduce the information modelling in infrastructure is already in progress. The first challenge is therefore to move to the item that is the finest information by establishing a structure and a standard for information exchange (recognized internationally) and adapted tools, either traversal, such as digital models, or specialized, as tools developed internally by each actor. To meet these challenges, the project program MINnD is structured around five themes.
The “Monitoring of changes in practices and knowledge around the digital model” will share all information and advances in this field, whether from business partners, from business experiences recounted in other countries publications, from software editors, from the regulation (such as the European Directive INSPIRE, or COBie, the formal schema of the UK government) or from academic publications.
After identifying the locks in current practices, the Theme 1 “Uses and Change management” will identify (i) the recommendations for the improvement of tools, of technology and processes, due to experimentations and other works issued from other MINnD themes, (ii) the overall implementation methodologies, since the start-up phase of the project to the operation and maintenance phases, (iii) performance indicators to assess improvements in quality, costs, return on investment, progress fulfilled and to reach, risks, etc.
The Theme 2 “Use Case – Experimentation” will seek to undertake trials of tools, of methods and processes on some real use cases; (i) use case inside the same trade or for a specific actor typology; (ii) use case crossing several trades, in order to test the interactions between actors; (iii) characteristic use cases representing dialogues between private designers and public owners.
The Theme 3 “Information Structure” will lead to functional specifications to describe the data model needed to specify data attributes, handle them, share them, and store them in a sustainable way. The idea is to be inspired by the IFC formalism (which is meant to be a neutral format for data exchange) and complete the list of IFC existing objects (data dictionary) for Building with business objects for Infrastructure.
Finally, the Theme 4 “Proposals to adapt the regulations” will focus on the preparation of proposals for changing texts, of a helping guide for the drafting of contracts between project stakeholders, of an analysis of the regulation implementation of the Digital Model and its effect on managing changes in the construction sector, as well as technological proposals and procedures for the engagement of collaborative design work, or on the digital signature act.