SBB Joins buildingSMART International as a Principal Member
London, (March 27, 2023) – buildingSMART International is pleased to announce that the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) has joined as a Principal Member of buildingSMART International (bSI). This is the second member in this new category following the announcement that the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) joined in 2022.
SBB is the national railway company of Switzerland, and they were founded in 1902, is headquartered in Bern. It is the largest rail and transport company of Switzerland and operates on most standard gauge lines of the Swiss network. It also heavily collaborates with most other transport companies of the country to provide fully integrated timetables with cyclic schedules. SBB was ranked first among national European rail systems in the 2017 European Railway Performance Index for its intensity of use, quality of service, and safety rating.
buildingSMART is a growing community comprising all stakeholders in the built asset industry who want to better collaborate and realize societal, environmental, and economic benefits of digital ways of working. bSI is supported by a growing set of members who contribute to the development of open standards and services. The Principal Membership category is for leading organizations that demonstrate the use and adoption of the standards and services aligned to the Technical Roadmap. Members of this category provide key input to the developments and activities at bSI and support the ever-enhancing openBIM® workflows for the benefit of the industry.
Dr. Adrian Wildenauer, Head of BIM Standardisation at SBB commented “as one of the largest public clients in Switzerland, we have to take a pioneering role in the digital transformation of the construction industry. The new membership enables us to actively shape the standards of the future. Our goal is clear: we start with the first projects in 2024 in the bidding process with openBIM Standards.”
Léon van Berlo, Technical Director, buildingSMART International commented that “SBB joining as a Principal Member is hugely welcomed news as we continue to develop more standards and services as illustrated in the Technical Roadmap. Having such supportive organization like SBB shows we can demonstrate value in the reliability of standards and services we produce and this will help the whole industry. I look forward to working closely with SBB and AASHTO on making openBIM more readily available”.
About buildingSMART International
buildingSMART International is a vendor-neutral and not for profit body that leads the development of open standards that support digital information flows across the built asset industry. Its mission is to proactively engage industry participants who want to develop open standards for planning, design, procurement, assembly and operation of buildings and infrastructure worldwide. It provides the international network plus the necessary technical and process support to develop consensus based open standards. Its members, who range from across the entire built environment spectrum, collaborate under the buildingSMART organization and management. buildingSMART also partners with other international standards bodies such as ISO, the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Its core Industry Foundation Class (IFC) standard achieved ISO approval in 2012.