Product Data Management for Sustainability: An Interoperable Approach for Sharing Product Data in a BIM Environment

Several research and development projects in the construction industry show the need of coherent product libraries to ease information sharing among involved stakeholders. In these projects, designers are often the main actors addressed in the creation and fruition of such product libraries. Besides designers, the presented research addresses the needs of manufacturers, clients and users. To achieve this coherence of product libraries, there are issues such as standardisation of product data templates, numerosity and heterogeneity of products categories, interoperability in sharing data and scarce thrust of manufacturers in developing extensive libraries. Considering the European directives and regulations, manufacturers are required to provide detailed and structured information about their products, e.g. in the form of CE marks and/or Declaration of Performance (DOP). Hence, developing data structures that are already compliant with CE marks and DOPs information requirements improves manufacturers' capability of promoting their products. Moreover, this makes clients and users aware of provided information, giving them the possibility of comparing performances of different products and consequently choosing only those products that fit better their needs. The aim of the here described research activity is twofold: defining a common data structure for product data and using existing technologies to share these data. The presented research proposes a conceptual model for providing such structure for product data to facilitate Product Data Management (PDM). This structure relies on standardised Product Data Templates (PDT) and Product Data Sheets (PDS) for enhancing the sharing process within to a Building Information Modelling (BIM) environment. Moreover, an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) structure has been developed for transferring product data allowing a machine-readable exchange of information. The result of the described research is the definition of information requirements for developing an online product library that permits a user-friendly consultation by stakeholders and an automated extraction of data by software.