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From Wasted BIM Data to Automated Control Sequences: How the Industry Is Starting to Close the Design-to-Operations Gap
MEP engineering firms invest heavily in data-rich 3D BIM models during design, embedding equipment relationships, capacities, motor horsepowers, and system hierarchies. Often, those models turn into flat PDFs by the time they reach the general contractor. The 3D data sits on a hard drive. Operations teams rebuild asset inventories from scratch.
"A lot of times, all that hard work that we do in the early design stage ends up tossed in the trash," said Rob Knight, an MEP engineer at ARUP, a global engineering and consulting firm that designs mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems for hospitals, universities, and commercial high-rises.
Knight described the cascading data problem at NexusCon 2025: his firm's room numbers don't match the general contractor's shop drawing numbers, which don't match the asset tags the building owner assigns in their CMMS. By the time facilities teams get the keys, they're manually entering air handler lists into operational systems that could have been populated directly from the design model.
Knight is running small internal trials to close pieces of this gap. One experiment embeds Brick schema tags directly into the design BIM so that relationship data between equipment, zones, and spaces can export to platforms that ingest semantic models. Another uses BIM tool APIs to push asset data into CMMS systems directly, bypassing COBie (Construction Operations Building Information Exchange), the spreadsheet-based standard that has been the industry's default handover format for years.
Further out, ARUP participated in national labs research on Open Building Controls, where BIM building geometry feeds an energy model, Modelica models ASHRAE Guideline 36 control sequences at design time, and a pilot with Johnson Controls exported actual controller code directly to DDC equipment from the simulation.
For service providers watching the design-to-operations handover break the same way on every project, the research signals where the fix will eventually come from: the design model itself.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
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MEP engineering firms invest heavily in data-rich 3D BIM models during design, embedding equipment relationships, capacities, motor horsepowers, and system hierarchies. Often, those models turn into flat PDFs by the time they reach the general contractor. The 3D data sits on a hard drive. Operations teams rebuild asset inventories from scratch.
"A lot of times, all that hard work that we do in the early design stage ends up tossed in the trash," said Rob Knight, an MEP engineer at ARUP, a global engineering and consulting firm that designs mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems for hospitals, universities, and commercial high-rises.
Knight described the cascading data problem at NexusCon 2025: his firm's room numbers don't match the general contractor's shop drawing numbers, which don't match the asset tags the building owner assigns in their CMMS. By the time facilities teams get the keys, they're manually entering air handler lists into operational systems that could have been populated directly from the design model.
Knight is running small internal trials to close pieces of this gap. One experiment embeds Brick schema tags directly into the design BIM so that relationship data between equipment, zones, and spaces can export to platforms that ingest semantic models. Another uses BIM tool APIs to push asset data into CMMS systems directly, bypassing COBie (Construction Operations Building Information Exchange), the spreadsheet-based standard that has been the industry's default handover format for years.
Further out, ARUP participated in national labs research on Open Building Controls, where BIM building geometry feeds an energy model, Modelica models ASHRAE Guideline 36 control sequences at design time, and a pilot with Johnson Controls exported actual controller code directly to DDC equipment from the simulation.
For service providers watching the design-to-operations handover break the same way on every project, the research signals where the fix will eventually come from: the design model itself.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week:
This is a great piece!
I agree.