The Virtual Buildings Information System (VBIS) was developed with funding assistance from the Victorian Government’s Future Industries Sector Growth Program. Built on an open syntax standard that will be freely available to the market, VBIS is a digital platform for facilitating property asset and lifecycle management by enabling the transfer of information from digital construction processes to building owners and facility managers.
Bryon Price – Strategic Development Director – A.G. Coombs Advisory (a subsidiary of building services specialist A.G. Coombs Group) told Built Offsite VBIS also has application in the offsite construction sector.
“Offsite is the future of construction and this is a big part of the future of digitisation for construction. BIM’s use is now widespread, but where VBIS comes into play is in bringing information from BIM along with other data sets in a consistent way to ensure all data sets connect in a very resilient way, resulting in a high level of standardisation and consistent outcomes.”
VBIS entailed the development of new naming standards to facilitate the construction process and the specification of project deliverables. “Existing standards including Uniclass don’t provide the granularity required to analyse detailed equipment asset databases or link to specific types of equipment information,” he said. “VBIS is working closely with the teams from BIM-MEPAUS and Uniclass to develop mapping between VBIS virtual component tag codes and Uniclass codes to ensure consistent alignment between the two classifications.” “VBIS has an important role to play in offsite construction, particularly with the increasingly common scenario where the different elements of a building are being made in different factories or on different sub-assemblies in different locations.”
The platform was developed to align with the Victorian Digital Asset Strategy (VDAS), which rolled out across all relevant government agencies in February 2019, encompassing Digital Engineering (DE) and Building Information Modelling (BIM).■
