Vodice, 3rd–5th October 2019 – BIM will fundamentally transform building services in the coming years. This was the convinced opinion of the participants in the “12th Engineering Days”, which were organized by the Croatian Chamber of Electrical Engineering. As a specialist in the use of BIM in the area of building services, ATP Zagreb’s leading electrical engineer, Branko Knežević, was invited to offer an insight into ATP’s wealth of experience.
Knežević explained the many advantages of BIM for building services on the basis of the example of the Designer Outlet Croatia: “Designing with building information modeling provides access to a large amount of information that is stored and linked with elements in the 3D model”, said the building services engineer. “Hence, a line is not just a line.It is an element packed with complex information.”
This comprehensive information and data management increases the quality of a project many times over. For example, the capacity assigned to an element can be generated automatically with the help of the description of the circuit technology. The basis of this calculation is provided by information about the total installed capacity per circuit and, later, about the elements in the junction boxes.
ATP Zagreb also used this advantage in designing the Designer Outlet near Zagreb: During the BIM-supported integrated design process the complexity of the site could be gauged in advance using 360° visualization and then the ongoing project status could be continuously portrayed in real time. The digital building twin created by BIM also serves over the long term for facility management activities and for the coordination of all technical maintenance work.
ATP and BIM
ATP is one of Europe’s leading integrated design offices. Since 2012 ATP has modeled all projects with BIM. This method depicts all architectural, technical, physical, and functional characteristics of a future building in a central, digital twin. The interdisciplinary design culture practiced by ATP for more than 40 years makes it possible to exploit all the advantages of digitalization for the sustainable success of a building.
