Having more than one occupant / department use a room?

[DHannanSGUL]

I'm currently converting all my Autocad 2D plans of our medical university into 3D Revit BIM models. In our research building, there are several rooms that are shared between departments, so there's often either a 50%/50% or a 33%/33%/33% split in laboratories, stores and freezer rooms.
Is there a way to enter that shared use between departments of single rooms into Revit so that when I use Colour Fill Schemes, it's shown in with the relevant hatching, as well as being split in the room schedule for later analysis in Excel?

In Autocad I had to manually do the various hatching within the room polyline and for the room data I created blocks of attributes with each divided section for export into Excel.

Thanks

[barthbradley]

Room Separation Lines can be used to "subdivide" a large room. Not sure this is what you mean though.   

[kadmonkee]

set up area plans and create different areas per department 

areas and rooms are treated different

use area boundaries to define the areas needed

[ToanDN]

Both approaches above should work.

The room separation line approach is less work involved.  You can create Department color scheme to show different portion of the room in their Department colors, and create Room Name color scheme to show the entire room as a single color.  For scheduling, you can play with Sort by and Itemize instances to whether show them as 3 different rooms (Department schedule) or as a single room (Room or Finish Schedule).

Using Area plan needs more work and coordination, unless you do need the Area plan for other purposes.

[DHannanSGUL]

Thanks for the replies and suggestions.

I was thinking along the lines of some of the other CAFM software, such as Planet which we use, which allows one room to be subdivided into different department percentage allocation. It still appears as one room when listing all the spaces, but you can drill down to even more detailed info for each room if required. I've attached a screenshot for your reference. The window below is for a single room.
I could split the room using the room separator as suggested, but I'd need to have both of those sub-divisions use the same room number and when exporting the room schedule to share, the recipient might think there's an error with multiple entries with the same room number (apart from Revit warning me about it too). I think they'd also then each have their own room tag on the floor plan which also creates the wrong idea that there are two rooms next to each other with the same number.
Ultimately I'm wanting to export my room schedule for compiling the data for our annual submission to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (https://www.hesa.ac.uk/ )
I know Revit isn't designed as a space-management tool, but it would be useful for my use if it had that additional functionality - along with the ability to show the areas in the Colour Fill Legends.

[Anonymous]

DHannanSGUL

Perhaps you could just add some extra department parameters in the room properties.  The text that you add in the cell is up to you.  There would be some sorting to do.  But It seems like a schedulable solution.  Check the properties of the rooms.  There are several Parameters already there.  See image below.

[SteveKStafford]

As data/information to capture in the model there is no reason you can't put something like Admin,Finance in the Department field. An area and area plane associated with the Department parameter would generate a unique color for that combination. Admin and Finance as individual values would have their own colors so Revit's color scheme would treat Admin,Finance as something "else" and use a unique color.

[DHannanSGUL]

Thanks - I've had a look at implementing those suggestions this morning.

The issue I know I'd face when presenting the plans to the various end-users and heads of departments is that they'll be glancing over the drawing for the colour of their department, and will most likely miss rooms that have a different colour that indicates a shared space.

Similarly when running an analysis in Excel or PowerBI, if those rooms have 2 departments combined in one name, then they'll appear as a separate line and won't be included with the other individual department entries.
In my ideal world, the room would have a single boundary but have the different individual hatches within it which are reflected in the schedule. I know it's manually achievable in Autocad using hatches and attributes in blocks, but I appreciate Revit is a completely different beast.
Thanks again for the help.

[DHannanSGUL]

Thanks - I've managed to add a bunch of other parameters I need to keep track of for the HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) submission as well as other TRAC (Transparent Approach to Costing) data our finance team need to log.
The only issue I think I'd have is that even if I am able to have more than field for 'Department', it would still use the total area of the room instead of being divided by the amount of departments sharing that space.
It looks like I might have to manually edit those entries after exporting to Excel.

[SteveKStafford]

It's a reality of data management. You're wrestling with an abstraction that we are comfortable with..."the room is shared" but the software says it is different from the others. For color plans, it is story telling, if you explain that shared rooms have their own color they'll be able to figure it out, it's not hard and it is more accurate too.

As suggested earlier, the room separator would provide a unique room (occupant) and color fill but half the area of the "room" that is shared. To see the total you'd have to add those shared rooms together.

Another angle... Revit Spaces and Zones (for MEP), spaces belong to zones so you could combine some spaces into a zone that is the shared combo. That introduces more complexity tho...

[DHannanSGUL]

Thank you all for your responses and clarifying the issues. I now have a clearer idea of what is and isn't possible for what I had in mind and will have to adjust my process accordingly.