Logic for ensuring the data exchange integrity of building information models
Introduction
There is a significant and growing demand for diverse aspects of design and construction data to be shared among project participants throughout entire design and construction processes. The sharing differs according to the roles of participants, contractual agreements, project stages, mandated performance levels, building codes, and contextual issues at hand. Some shared exchanges and their associated concerns are known before the outset of a project, but because of a different scope of each project, there are still several troublesome issues in collaboration, cooperation, and communication during project phases. For example, an architect, a structural engineer, and a constructor require different software to create, manipulate, analyze, and apply building data and their distinct data models for achieving their particular objectives. These heterogeneous information and data must be maintained consistently in diverse types of domains, phases, and software for sharing a correct set of data models referred as to synchronization. However, with the increasing number of requirements in complicated projects, building data cannot be easily coordinated and shared among domain professionals [8], [15]. To address the disfunctional situation, the importance of a neutral format that is able to support importing and exporting building model data between various building information modeling (BIM) authoring tools and applications has been increasingly recognized.
One of the most popular neutral formats broadly used in the architecture, engineering and construction, and facility management (AEC-FM) industries is Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) [11]. Diverse industries, such as the Precast/Pre-stressed Concrete Industry (PCI) and the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), have already applied the IFC schema as a primary neutral BIM data exchange format to their data exchange processes. But, in order to reliably use such data exchanges, potential users need to have a high level of confidence that the exchanges translate their product model data completely and accurately. Since BIM data exchanges using a neutral format must support complete and robust import and export of product model data without geometrical and semantical translation errors or omissions, validation of BIM data exchanges is critically needed prior to project application.
The development projects of IFC data exchange specification and processes for the Precast/Pre-stressed Concrete Industry (PCI), the American Concrete Institute (ACI), and American Industry of Steel Construction (AISC), allowed authors to examine and develop a solid checking method and process for ensuring consistent data exchanges of BIM product models using the IFC format in these domains. In addition, the authors collected a variety of specifications of the distinct domain data exchanges and the translation requirements of their IFC-mapped native objects extracted from the IFC data exchange process development of the PCI. This paper shows the identified types of product data exchange requirements, the rules of IFC data translation and exchange, the scenarios of each rule checking process, and the logic of their checking implementation. Based on these findings, the validation features of IfcDoc have been developed with the collaboration of the authors and Tim Chipman who is an owner of Constructavity. The detailed information of IfcDoc is described in Section 5.
Section snippets
Industry Foundation Classes and model view definitions
Among neutral formats for AEC/FM and civil infrastructure industries, IFC has been extensively employed and studied by industry experts and researchers with the goal of accomplishing desired BIM data exchanges between heterogeneous BIM authoring and application tools [21]. The specifications and the data structures of IFC are defined in the EXPRESS language along with modeling constructs, data exchange definitions, and syntactic and semantic requirements [4]. The IFC schema, which can be
Related efforts and research
To ensure the accuracy of IFC/BIM data translation, a mapped IFC instance file must be evaluated according to its assurance of compliance with MVD specifications. Even though several approaches have been studied and developed for MVD-based IFC instance file validation, how accurately the IFC interfaces of BIM software implement their importing and exporting features for IFC and BIM native data bindings still has significant limitations. The primary reason for these limitations resides on the
MVD rule logic and structures
MVD encompasses the semanctic requirements and the syntactic restrictions of the IFC schema in order to represent domain-oriented specifications of BIM data exchanges. These specifications are defined by a series of concepts that contain relational diagrams and implementation agreements with regard to the specifications and the requirements of BIM data exchanges, as shown in Fig. 1. Thus, project participants are expected to evaluate their BIM data according to corresponding concept
IfcDoc application
By utilizing and combining rule logic, several checking algorithms and features were developed and added on top of the IfcDoc tool. The IfcDoc application is open to the public as a form of binary and source codes so that anyone can download it from the buildingSMART International website to use it for their own purposes. The initial objective of the IfcDoc tool was to help generate MVD documentation automatically according to the IFC schema. The tool can import an IfcDoc file or an mvdXML file
Conclusion
With the growing requirements of a building project, a building design will encompass a continuously increasing number of requirements and data demanded by diverse disciplines. As a result, they will become more keenly aware of semantic integrity of building data. To ensure data accuracy and interoperability, this study formalizes the requirements of model view definitions and entails the development of rule logic and a validation framework. The ability to automatically check the validity of an
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to express their appreciation to Tim Chipman at Constructavity for developing the rule-checking features on top of the IfcDoc according to the demands and their specifications of the authors.
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2022, Building and EnvironmentCitation Excerpt :This can be seen in the examples of Malsane et al. [20] and Preidel and Borrmann [115] for fire safety checks, or the example of Zhou and El-Gohary [112] for energy analysis/checking. Focus has also been given to approaches that include the establishment of MVDs towards the proper setting/delivery of information requirements in IFCs for code checking and ultimately for building permits (e.g., [105,108]). The use of IFC BIM models towards the process of DBPs has been active in Singapore for several years, through an initial IFC-to-FORNAX translation, and then applying proprietary rule-checking [106].