XML Interface between PACES and Criteria Composer

The Design Automation Capability Package was conducting research aimed at accelerating the facility delivery process. This research was validated using a tools for conceptual architectural design, known as Facility Composer (https://ff.cecer.army.mil/fc/index.jsp). PACES is used by the USACE and Air Force to determine estimates of facility cost from a minimum of detailed information. The assemblies and cost models contained within PACES represent considerable effort on the part of the government. It is highly desirable for tools to reuse, rather than reinvent, these models. This project's focus was the ability to automatically generate PACES cost estimates based on the space layout and facility criteria contained in a Facility Composer model.

The focus of this effort was to develop a data import capability for PACES to allow the development of cost estimates with little or no manual data entry.

To integrate other software applications with PACES, an interface was developed using self-describing, vendor neutral, extensible markup language (XML) file format using the ifcXML specification developed by the International Alliance of Interoperability (IAI, http://www.iai-international.org). The PACES import mechanism would gather information provided in the XML exchange file and supply any missing information from a set of defaults. These applications would then take advantage of the cost estimating assemblies defined within PACES.