PAS 1192-2 consultation

Publicly Available Specifications (PAS) are fast-track standards, specifications, codes of practice or guidelines developed to meet an immediate market need following guidelines set out by BSI (British Standards Institution). Within 2 years they are reviewed to assess whether they should be revised, withdrawn, or become formal British Standards or international standards.

PAS 1192-2 is the ‘Specification for information management for the capital/delivery phase of construction projects using building information modelling’. It came into effect on 28 February 2013.

On 31 July 2015 BSI published a draft revised PAS 1192-2 for consultation.

The changes in the revised document are largely intended to tidy up the terminology used and to reflect the publication of additional standards and the Digital Plan of Work, that were not available when the original was prepared.

Other notable changes include:

• Increasing the government target for reducing the cost of public sector assets by 2016 from 20% to 33%.
• Removing references to the CIC BIM protocol and CIC Schedule of services.
• An emphasis on clash avoidance rather than detection.
• Changing the role of ‘information manager’ to ‘project information manager’.
• Clarifying that NRM and NBS Create are not classification systems.

More controversially, when referring to the development of the project information model (PIM, that is the design and construction phase building information model) and the transfer of ownership from the design suppliers to the construction suppliers, it now states “The contractors model will be by replacement rather than a modification of the design model to avoid an(y) legal problems of responsibility”.

It is thought that this is a legal clarification of ‘ownership’ as formal adoption of the design model, rather than a requirement for the contractor to create a new model.

Talking to bimplus, Casey Rutland, associate director at Arup said, “To me it’s simply a mechanism to clearly separate legal responsibility”.

Conversely, in the development of specialist sub-contractors sub models to replace the original designers’ intent it refers to a change of responsibility rather than ownership, making clear that specialist teams do not alter the models produced by the professional designers, they build new models, adding “In this way ownership of information is assured such that responsibility remains with the authors of the different information sets and it is not shared by changing or editing other’s information models.”

The consultation closed on 31 Aug 2015.