No single model contains a whole building. The architect models walls and rooms, the structural engineer models beams and columns, and the MEP engineer models ducts, pipes, and cable trays — each in their own file, often in different software. A federated model is how those parts become reviewable as one building.
How it works
Federation is an overlay, not a merge. The discipline models are loaded together into a common environment — Navisworks, an ACC Model Coordination space, or a viewer — and aligned on a shared coordinate system and project origin. Ownership stays untouched: when the structural engineer publishes a new version, the federation picks it up while every other model stays as it was.
Frame glossary
Discipline models, overlaid in place
That separation is the point. Each discipline retains authorship and responsibility for its own content, while coordinators get the complete picture for clash detection, design review, and progress tracking. Getting the shared coordinates right is the perennial prerequisite — a federation with mismatched origins produces nonsense overlaps before any real coordination can start.
Why it matters for BIM analytics
Analytics questions are usually cross-discipline: quantities per level across all trades, clash counts between systems, model growth per discipline over time. Answering them requires the federated view, not any single file.
Frame connects to ACC Model Coordination views and treats the federation as a first-class model source: the combined element data flows into Power BI reports with each element still attributed to its source model, so a portfolio dashboard can filter by discipline, source file, or level across the whole federation.