In software development circles the concept of source control is crucial to the development of any application, but even more so far large extensive applications that could have hundreds or even thousands of developers interact with the source code over many years.
It is well established that a number of owner operators of buildings have elected to maintain "up-to-date" Revit models (or their long term design partners choose to) in order to facilitate constant changes, upgrades and renovations to their properties. A variety of creative solutions have and continue to be employed to allow the "owners" of these "source" models to keep these models up-to-date. Sometimes it is a selective copy/paste (or the equivalent using an API based tool) other times it may be a common model that "everyone" works in while making use of the Phasing features in Revit, there are likely other approaches or variations to these common themes.
With the advent of Revit Cloud Worksharing it became easier to share access to these "common" models, however for a variety of reasons, common access to a single model is problematic particularly when there are multiple active projects with different timelines and multiple design and construction partners all accessing the data.
Arguably, in these cases Revit and RCW would benefit from a source control methodology more akin to what is used in software development. Where a "building" can be downloaded and branched according to the needs of each design (development team). Each team can then execute their changes following the normal course of events used today. Eventually that particular Team would need to submit a "Pull" request to merge their design into the master source. Just like software development depending on the configuration of the environment such a pull request might automatically trigger reviews prior to being accepted, or it could go through as what amounts to a "master Sync With Central". BIM 360 today by in large has the tools available that such a workflow could be imagined to be feasible, the biggest issue to overcome would be the automated "Master Sync With Central" and the user interface and experience for review and merging the changes.
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