BS 8644-1:22 & Autodesk: Fire Safety and the Golden Thread

We are excited to announce a series of Autodesk product workflow blogs that will tackle how technology can help owners, main contractors, subcontractors, and architects better prepare their teams for the changes coming from The Building Safety Act (BSA). 

The series of blogs dedicated to the Building Safety Act are written with expert insights from Senior Autodesk Technical Solutions Executive, Chris Palmer. 

Today, we will talk about how your project teams can standardise project metadata using the Autodesk Construction Cloud parameters service. But first, let’s understand why this is important from the Building Safety Act perspective.  

First, what is the British Standard for the Digital Management of Fire Safety Information? 

• BS8644-1:2022 has a broader scope than the safety case for higher-risk buildings; however, it aims to help standardise the delivery of fire safety information for all assets and thus aid the generation of the golden thread and compliance with the Building Safety Act 2022. 
• The BS 8644 -1 : 2022 standard seeks to replace analogue, paper-based and manual processes with a digital process to ensure valuable information is not overlooked, miscommunicated or forgotten.  
• An Information Management Process is designed to be appropriate for all assets, including those for which the Golden Thread is required, with the digital platforms used at user discretion. 
• FIREie – the mechanism by which fire safety information is exchanged between parties. 

Now, what about BS ISO 19650?

The standard specifies requirements for information management during an asset’s lifecycle. At the same time, BS 8644 builds on the BS EN 19650 series where appropriate in relation to Fire Safety Information for buildings and assets is subject to requirements of the Building Safety Act 2022 and includes additional requirements to record data over and above COBie, for non-maintainable assets (e.g. walls, structural columns). 

Imagine your projects have BIM processes in compliance with the ISO standard; it is then anticipated that ISO 19650-2 and ISO 19650-3 will be used to specify and deliver fire safety information in addition to BS 8644 requirements. If your projects, on the contrary, do not have BIM processes yet or are not yet ISO-adherent on a project, BS 8644-1 is recommended as the standard by which to deliver Fire Safety Information on your project. 

The purpose of the Fire Safety Information lies within eventually getting the right information to the right people, which includes but is not limited to clear identification of tasks, events and fire safety throughout the asset lifecycle, environments at risk and sharing responsibility across the project team. 

Source: BS 8644:1 – Pg 4, Fig 1. Example of relevant information before, during and after a fire incident 

Now, .... what steps can you take to begin collecting the correct Fire Safety data, begin generating the Golden Thread and achieve compliance with the requirements of the Building Safety Act when working in Autodesk Construction Cloud? 

One of the ways of managing the compilation of industry-specific standard data requirements, such as COBie and assisting with the collation of FIREie information to assist with Building Safety data requirements can be achieved by leveraging 'Paraments Service' in Autodesk Construction Cloud. 

Let’s look at how you can manage your organisation’s shared parameters via a single cloud location.  

The parameters service can be located in the account admin section of your Autodesk Construction Cloud hub. 

To standardise data requirements across projects, the service will enable you to create collections of parameters to be used across different projects helping you to communicate project data requirements with sub-consultants and suppliers and ensuring the information you are receiving in models is helping you to achieve your data handover requirements such as COBie and FIREie. You can upload existing shared parameters files at the beginning or do so when you can create new parameters. 

Whilst labels and categorisations can be added to quickly help you search through large numbers of parameters, edits and updates that you make will be carried through into any future projects which you load the parameters into. 

In addition to that, you can: 

• Go and check the current instance and type parameters associated with any element of your Revit file

• Add, categorise, tag, search, filter, and update custom Revit parameters 
• Display parameter description fields as tool tips to ensure that information added is as relevant and accurate as possible 
• Utilise the parameters service to add specific data requirements for rooms zones or spaces 
• View the metadata as part of the standard 3D model viewing capabilities once the model has been published  
• Update missing information against any of these elements before publishing the model to the cloud through the reverse settlement function 

• Add FIREie parametric fields and collate an update through our field tools to form part of our BS- 8644 information exchanges 

This lets you streamline important parameter information by connecting the data available in Autodesk desktop tools, like Revit, with the Autodesk Construction Cloud.  

Here is the video our team has created to guide you through the process:

What’s next & what else is available today?  

1. We are going to explore how we can carry through and utilize this initial design information within your Autodesk Build Assets module in our next blog within the Building Safety Act series 
2. Keep an eye on the next webinar where our technical experts will tune in with very practical use cases around BSA workflows in Autodesk Construction Cloud 
3. Watch our first webinar within the BSA series and learn how customers, like Morgan Sindall, are preparing for new industry requirements 

Related resources

• To learn more about the impact of the Building Safety Act on the construction industry, we would encourage you to read What the Building Safety Bill means for UK construction – and how to get ready. We also recommend downloading the copy of our Building Safety Act whitepaper.
• You can also watch our webinar: Uncovering the Building Safety Act with Morgan Sindall.