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Extracting COBie data from Revit

Liz Sanderson
Liz Sanderson
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Introduction

Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie) is an information exchange specification for facility managers. For more detailed information on COBie, please see this page on the BuildingSMART Alliance website. COBie information can be stored as additional schedules in a Revit dataset and will be read by FME's Autodesk Revit Reader/Writer.

This example uses FME Workbench to extract COBie information from an Autodesk Revit file into an Excel spreadsheet, using the standard COBie template.

Source Data

The source data used for this example is the buildingSmart Alliance Duplex Apartment COBie sample. The Revit RVT file can be downloaded from the buildingSMART Common Building Information Model Files page under Project 1 - Duplex Apartment. Select the file 2011-09-14-Duplex-RVT.

This RVT file has the additional schedules containing COBie information needed for handover.

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Workspace

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There are several sections in the workspace, corresponding to the different output sheets in the Excel file.

Facility

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This section combines the Project, Site, and Building features from Revit to create a Facility record. Integrated, the Facility record contains information about the measurement units used in the Revit project, the site location, number of stories, and some ID information.

Floor

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This section uses the BuildingStorey information to create Floor records. This will result in three records, one for each level, containing information about height and elevation.

Space and Zone

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This section uses Space features to create both Space and Zone records

Type

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This section extracts one of each of the the building’s interior components to create Type records, containing information about each type of asset.

Component

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This section combines the building’s interior components with the Space and Type records to create Component records.

Results in Excel

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The records are written to Excel using a template XLS file to provide the desired cell formatting.

Data Attribution

Data was obtained from buildingSmart Alliance’s Duplex Apartment COBie sample.

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