BIMSens was used on a water treatment facility part of a larger gas processing plant in Queensland. The water treatment buildings are simple shapes wrapped around complex piping and cabling network required to process the 1M litres of water per day. The intricacies of the piping system with more than 200 000 individual parts and about 5000 activities in the programme, made for a challenging project for construction sequencing and planning.
BIMSens was initially used to demonstrate Critical Path colour filtering. Using a Navisworks model connected to a P6 programme via Timeliner, BIMSens was connected directly to the P6 database using Web Services to colour code the model based on the activities being critical or not, then use a colour gradient to illustrate the activity float.
The results were a clear success in terms of the visibility and understanding that it gave of the project critical path but also technically in extending BIMSens to a new data source format (P6 Web Services) making its first step toward data source neutrality. An additional – and unexpected – outcome was the highlighting of all the objects that could not be related to the programme, with either missing or outdated activity ids. It made the team realise how many discrepancies had built up in the 4D based on an isolated copy of the programme (Timeliner default behaviour) and how many elements were missing in either the programme or the model.
This first emphasized one of the most powerful aspect of BIMSens 3D colour filtering: it gives an immediate understanding of the data quality, more often than not showing how bad it is.