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BIM: integration of ISO 16757 AS EN standards - Position of CEIR

Tuesday 27 June 2017

CEIR and FECS believe that manufacturers must play a key role in the ongoing development of an acceptable international harmonised Building Information Modeling (BIM) system for the bathroom industry. Therefore, CEIR and FECS agreed to work together to achieve this goal.

CEIR and FECS believe that the industry needs to be aware of the templates that are under development in the various countries. In addition, when necessary, the Industry must voice its opinion to CEN/TC 442 for BIM standardisation. This is due to the nature and scope of CEN/TC 442:

  • it covers standardisation in the field of structured semantic life cycle information for the built environment that may impact manufacturers
  • it is developing a structured set of standards, specifications and reports which specify methodologies to define, describe, exchange, monitor, record and securely handle asset data, semantics and processes with links to geospatial and other external data that may impact manufacturers.

As a CEN/TC 442 liaison committee, CEIR together with FECS provided the WG4 with a joint recommendation on BIM Product Data Templates for:

  • valves
  • taps
  • sanitaryware products

This recommendation aimed to provide CEN/TC 442 with the Industries direct input for consideration.
As a CEN/TC 442 liaison committee via the WG4 sessions, CEIR, and indirectly FECS, were informed about the integration of ISO 16757 into EN standards covering BIM. However, this raises strong concern, notably in terms of feasibility, liability and compatibility.
The reason for this concern is:
ISO 16757 part 1 §3.4 requires that the behavior of the product is defined by an "arithmetic function" according to environmental variables (BSS properties) instead of "normally done by tables, formulas, or diagrams where the reader can relate some situation specific parameters of the system with the actual behaviour of the product".

Therefore, CEIR is drafting (with FECS) a Position Paper addressed to CEN/TC 442 stating the above mentioned concerns and questioning the feasibility of functions from a physical / mechanical point of view, the accuracy of the environmental variables and the overlap between VDI specifications and harmonised product standards
Also, the ISO 16757 series was presented as based on a set of specifications (VDI3805) defining the properties of the products. These specifications are redundant  with certain parts of the Product Standards. Therefore, they should not be used as a substitute for the work carried out by Product TCs, which has been the subject of a European consensus.

CEIR and FECS recommendations

For the reasons stated above, CEIR and FECS recommend that the required product properties remain those contained in the CEIR and FECS BIM Product Data Templates.
These documents have been handed over to CEN/TC 442 WG4 as a recommendation for valves, taps and sanitaryware products. In the light of the state of the art, these templates are based on the Product Standards used by the professionals responsible for designing the installation of the product.

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