From BIM to CIM:
City Information Modeling and Data-Driven Design
This is a summary of an article originally published on www.architectmagazine.com/technology/from-bim-to-cim
People are Moving into Cities Faster than at any Time in History.
Architects, planners, engineers, and construction firms around the globe will need to design and build 10,000 new smart cities and their buildings by the year 2040. And they will need CIM to help them do it.
A Tsunami of Big Data and AEC Tools Floods the Profession.
The tsunami of data services and AECO + GIS software tools used to design and operate today’s increasingly data-driven Smart City and Smart Building projects is even more alarming—cities and buildings together generated more Big Data in just the past two years than they did in the previous 200 years combined. The practicing architect or planner who used just three to four software tools or web services in 2007 now uses more than a 15 to 20 on the same project today. To make matters more complicated, few of these tools interoperate, and the contextual data that AEC professionals get their hands on to make expensive design decisions is often uncurated, out-of-date, and unusable.
CIM is like SIMCity, but for Real Cities.
Enter the Age of CIM. Expert definitions of a CIM or City Information Model generally describe a fully integrated, semantically enabled “super-BIM” 3D city model that hyper-connects users to any contextual project data source or analysis tool—static or dynamic, spatial on nonspatial—from buildings, to roads and public spaces (open data), to streetlights (sensors/IoT), to people on the street (social media).
CIM models are used by both architects and planners for individual building, campus, and town planning projects of any scale. CIM users drag and drop their BIM project models into interactive, content-rich 3D city model environments right in their own web browsers, and can find any data relevant to their projects, ask any questions, run any analysis (solar, shadow, microclimate, traffic, LEED, and more), and collaborate with any team members anywhere in the world, all in real time.
AEC tech experts are talking about CIM:
“CIM offers new and enhanced opportunities for planners and other professionals working in the urban environment. Particularly, in relation to the deployment of real time data into the analysis of the conditions in which key planning and resource allocation decisions are made and the appreciation of the longer term impact of such decisions." (Thompson, et al, Urban Planning, 2016).
“A CIM model could enable city-wide simulation (for architects and planners) of various aspects such as traffic, congestion, energy, impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes or hurricanes, flood control, etc.” (Khemlani, AECBytes 2016).
A Platform for Data-Driven Design.
A true CIM is the holy grail of contextual project information and analysis tools for architects and planners. Users enjoy many transformational benefits:
Availability of immediate access to terabytes of project data content including, dozens of free and premium analytics tools, hundreds of 3D city models, and thousands of curated public and commercial data services.
Enjoy savings from a reduction in man-hours for time allocated to project research, team communication, and design time.
Eliminate spend on subscriptions for legacy software tools and web services.
Towards a Smarter World.
From the creators of Google Earth, Cityzenith’s Smart World CIM platform is used by architectural, engineering, engineering, and planning professionals around the world. Smart World launches officially at the UI Labs Innovation Center in Chicago on May 3, 2017, at 3 p.m. Visit www.cityzenith.com
http://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/from-bim-to-cim