Facilities @ Management

2.21 Data Structuring of CAD Drawings – My First Contact with FM

Alexander Redlein

My first contact with FM was when the governmental institutions of Austria set up a project to gain data from the design and construction phase to optimize the utilization phase. This was in the early 1990s. My team and I supported the chamber of architects to establish an open standard based on DXF Data format of Autodesk with layer and block definitions. Architects should structure their CAD drawing in a way that the different elements like carrying walls, windows, and lights should be delivered in the defined structure. My big advantage at this time was my interdisciplinary education as I studied electrical and control engineering at Vienna University of Technology as technical foundation and business administration at Vienna University for Business Administration, which gave me a broad economic but also legal background.

This legal background was also the reason we could change the data structure from being a copy of the data structure of the CAFM system used by the governmental institutions to a more general structure, that most of the used Computer Aided Architectural Design CADD systems could provide.

Why? In the beginning the public body presented the structure of their program and asked all architects and civil engineers to provide the final drawings of the building in this format and data structure. But only few CADD programs could deliver the structure in general, or the users had ...