Building Information Modeling (BIM) provides rich, machine-readable representations of proposed building designs. With BIM, it becomes practical to embed into computational tools the accumulated knowledge regarding good design practices. We envision the day when architects and clients can apply automated tools to evaluate a candidate design regarding support for a given building program and for best practices, at an engineering and quantitative level and also at a qualitative and organizational and social level.

This project will be to prove the concept and develop a BIM application automating the Courts Design Guide. It will automatically assess candidate GSA managed courthouse projects, converting the US Court Design Guide to an electronic format. The multiple parties involved in courthouse design: US Courts, GSA, current judges serving as users, legislative authorities and architects doing courthouse design, will all benefit from an objective tool that can assess a candidate design against guidelines and best practice, and to determine if it realizes its programmatic specification or not. Such an assessment tool has the potential to be used throughout the design development process, tuned to address aspects of the design as they are specified and detailed, leading to quicker development with fewer iterations and to improve the quality of all designs. It also has the potential for extensions, dealing with security, terrorism attacks, maintenance and other aspects of a courthouse design.

The prototype of such an assessment tool, at level, involves the development of multiple complementary aspects of an assessment environment:

1. interpreting the current rules, defined to be read and interpreted by people, into a form that is machine readable and can be automated;
2. development of the assessment software for applying the rules to a BIM model;
3. specification of the BIM representation, so that it provides adequate data to make the needed assessments.
4. determining the appropriate feedback to designers so they make determine the appropriate design response.
5. specification of the computer and system environment that makes this capability available for public use.

The context of use for this project is that the candidate designs will be represented in IFC, as specifically defined for the needs of this assessment. The checking tool will initially be Solibri Model Checker. The initial assumption is that the assessment tool will be made available as a web-based application, that people download models to for testing, and getting a report back of the results. While courthouse design is the initial test case, we are undertaking this project as a sample of the general case, for developing an assessment tool for any building type.

This website provides overview and progress information for this project.