buildingSMART Belgium at Digital Construction Day
buildingSMART Belgium hosted two sessions at this year’s Digital Construction Day. One looked at how AI is already changing day-to-day BIM work. The other gave an overview of the openBIM landscape and the buildingSMART community. Thank you to everyone who joined us, asked questions and stopped by for a chat.
From Prompt to Practice: How AI Is Changing Real Workflows
Louis Casteleyn (Brussels Airport Company) hosted the session on behalf of buildingSMART Belgium, together with Frederik Van Nespen (BEEL architecten) and Tim Lugtenburg (Spation). The aim was to show what AI is already doing today for real business challenges. Every example came from a real use case in a real company.
Use case 1 – Forma MCP at Brussels Airport Company.
Louis showed how an MCP server connected to Autodesk Forma supports the daily management of the platform through simple prompts. Examples included dashboards of inactive users to enforce access policies, creating folders in bulk for the entire building portfolio, setting up projects automatically from a filled-in template, and quick questions about project activity. The Forma MCP server he presented is freely available: https://lnkd.in/euYheVgY
Use case 2 – Compliance checking using AI at BEEL architecten.
Frederik showed how a Claude project, combined with a Revit MCP connection, checks a design against the project brief and building rules. Some rules span several objects, such as a minimum bathroom area that depends on the number of occupants in the unit. A BIM model alone struggles with those checks. Instead of filling the model with data, BEEL puts only “keys” (identifiers) in the model. The AI then links those keys to the brief and the rules. The model stays the single source of truth, and the AI retrieves structured data instead of generating it.
Use case 3 – AI Data Agent by Spation.
Tim presented the AI Data Agent, a Revit add-in that transfers unclassified table data from technical sheets, Excel files or PDFs into the right Revit parameters. The modeller reviews every proposal before anything is written to the model. On the UZ Gent project with Züblin, 221 supplier technical sheets were processed for 4,417 elements in the architectural model in about two hours, instead of roughly a week of manual work. Every value can be traced back to its source sheet and page. The add-in can be tried for free at www.spation.nl.
Collaborating with openBIM
In the afternoon, Evy Verwimp (Buildwise) and Jari Verniers (Bimplan) presented the openBIM ecosystem and how its standards and services work together: IFC to structure data, IDS to specify and check information requirements, BCF to communicate issues, bSDD for consistent terminology, the IFC Validation Service to ensure file quality, and openCDE to share data. They also introduced buildingSMART International, the Benelux chapter and the Belgian community. They highlighted our information sessions, games, publications, lobbying work and the buildingSMART Professional Certification efforts.
Presentations available
Both presentations can be downloaded from the Downloads section of our website.
Join the community
Want to help push openBIM forward in Belgium? Members of the Cluster Digital Construction are automatically members of buildingSMART Belgium. Fill in our form or get in touch via our website or LinkedIn to get involved.