Knowledge / Workflows
Drawing coordination review
Checking architectural, structural and MEP sheets against each other for conflicts, missing references and inconsistent schedules before issue.
Before every issue, someone has to check that the architectural, structural and services sheets describe the same building, which is what a drawing coordination review AI has to do across the whole set. Grids and levels have to match, the builders' work hole on the structural general arrangement has to be where the duct needs it, the door reference on the plan has to have a schedule row, and the detail reference has to point at a sheet that exists. Today the lead designer overlays the sets by eye, and the review is always partial. Model clash detection covers geometry, not annotation, references, schedules or revisions. Structured knowledge lets the team run the review at each issue and keeps the reviewer on the decisions about which discipline changes.
What the workflow involves today
Collect the current issue of every discipline's sheets and confirm the revisions are the ones going out together.
Overlay the general arrangements and check grids, levels and setting-out against each other.
Compare structural openings and builders' work holes with the services routes that need them.
Check every door, window and equipment reference on the plans against its schedule, and the schedule against the plans.
Follow each section and detail reference to the sheet it names and confirm the sheet exists at that revision.
Record each conflict, raise it with the discipline responsible, and hold the issue until it is resolved or noted.
Repeat at the next issue, usually for the sheets that changed and rarely for the ones that reference them.
Where generic AI tools fail
General-purpose tools read one sheet at a time. They cannot hold the structural general arrangement, the services layout and the architectural plan in view together, and they cannot know that a builders' work hole on one and a duct on another are the same opening, because nothing on either sheet says so in words. A detail reference is a code to them, not a pointer, so they cannot follow it to a sheet that has moved or been withdrawn. Ask for a coordination review and you get a description of each sheet and a note that they seem to relate to the same building.
Model clash detection has the opposite limitation. It sees geometry and nothing else, so an annotation that disagrees with the model, a schedule row that disagrees with the plan, or a reference to a superseded revision passes through it unnoticed. Between the two, the reviewer is left with a list of geometric clashes from one tool and a set of summaries from the other, and still has to open the sheets. What the generic tool produces reads like a review, which is the danger: a design manager under issue pressure takes the reassurance, and the missing hole is found by the core drill.
What changes with structured knowledge
When the sheets are structured knowledge, a grid line, an opening, a door reference or a detail callout on one sheet is already connected to the same thing on every other sheet and in the model, so the review reads across the set rather than sheet by sheet, and a sheet that changed is checked against every sheet that references it.
The reviewer receives a list of conflicts and broken references, grouped by sheet and by the pair of disciplines involved: an opening that differs in size or position between the structural and services sheets, a door on the plan with no schedule row, a detail reference that points at a withdrawn sheet. Each entry carries both references and the revision that introduced the difference.
The reviewer decides which discipline changes and what can go out with a note, and issues accordingly. Time goes on those calls rather than on the overlay. The issue record shows what was checked, at which revisions, and what was found, so when a conflict reaches site the question of whether it was known can be answered from the record rather than from memory.
We onboard a focused slice of your project data, configure the ingestion paths, extract a structured context graph, and build a workflow against the resulting structured knowledge layer.
Related to
The review reads the construction drawings from each discipline, the drawing schedules they reference, and the IFC and BIM models the sheets were cut from. It sits beside the specification to drawing consistency check, which compares the drawings with the written requirements, and the fire strategy consistency check, which makes the same comparison for compartmentation and escape.
Is this the same as model clash detection?
Which drawing formats does it read?
How do we see it on our own drawing set?