Connecting dRofus and Archicad: managing project data and requirements

This is the second session in the series of five webinars with which SIMBIM introduced Archicad 23, and the first devoted to the collaboration block. It is delivered by Joana Alsasua, BIM consultant at SIMBIM. The starting point is a familiar problem: even when working in BIM, project requirements — schedule of areas, regulatory constraints, equipment, estimated costs — remain scattered across spreadsheets and consultants' documents. When that information reaches the design team late, redesigns follow. dRofus is introduced as the database where that information lives in unified form throughout the building's life cycle. The session goes through the interface: room templates acting as a prototype and real rooms inheriting that data; information fields configurable according to the type of project; requirements for finishes, building services, fire protection or electrical installations; and equipment lists with quantities, responsibilities and an estimated budget. When a room departs from its template, the change is flagged and recorded with author and time. The central part is the live connection with Archicad, on an office building. The rooms in the database correspond to Archicad zones. Two ways of working are shown: enabling Place Mode so that, as a zone is placed, the room in the brief it corresponds to is chosen directly, or linking a zone that has already been built. The zone stamp then reads the code and the name coming from the database, and the designed area is set against the programmed one. Synchronisation is configured property by property, deciding in which direction each piece of data travels, and the result can be carried into a graphic override that shows at a glance which rooms meet the intended area and which do not. The same link applies to equipment: the items defined in dRofus are associated with favourites in the Archicad library, so that the palette shows how many units are planned, how many have been placed in the model and how many are missing, and the remaining ones are placed from there. The closing section looks to the later stages: inventory reports for procurement and tendering processes, tracking of estimated against actual cost, and structured export of the data to facility management applications. The session makes clear that dRofus is not a model validation tool, but a tool for defining and checking requirements.