Introduction to dRofus: Managing Building Requirements Across the Life Cycle

An introductory session on dRofus given by Joana Alsasua in SIMBIM's virtual room. It is set up from scratch, for those who do not know the tool: what problem it solves, how its database is organised and how it is used across the building's life cycle, from initial programming to the handover of data for maintenance. The final stretch is reserved for questions from those attending. The starting point is that many parties take part in a project, and a good number of them —developer, client, maintenance team, end users— handle critical information without ever opening the model. Those requirements live scattered across regulations, client specifications and loose documents. dRofus is presented as the single database where they are structured room by room and item by item, so that compliance is checked during design and not afterwards: data-driven design as opposed to model-driven design. The demonstration begins in the planning phase, inside dRofus: the functional tree of rooms, the record for each one with its tabs for use, construction, doors and windows or building services, and the templates for buildings with many identical rooms. It then jumps to Archicad, where the add-on links each zone to its room in the database, in Place Mode or on zones that already exist, and the coloured arrows in the panel indicate the direction each piece of data travels. Nothing reaches the database until the zones are synchronised, and that is where the programme area is compared with the actual measured one. The equipment block follows the same logic. Each item has its own record —description, reference image, responsible team, technical documentation— and is assigned to the rooms that need it, so that the model can keep a low level of geometric definition while the detail stays in the database. From Archicad you can see how many units had been planned and how many are placed, highlight them in the model and place the ones that are missing. The session closes with the output of that data: reports in PDF and Excel for procurement, and the export of the IFC to the database so that those who do not work in Archicad or Revit can consult the project in 3D from the browser. The presenter marks out two limits: dRofus is not a cost-estimating or a maintenance program, and it does not validate the model. Checking that a requirement is met is manual, or falls to validation tools such as Solibri.