Reference study of IFC software support: The GeoBIM benchmark 2019—Part I

Abstract

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), the buildingSMART open standard for BIM, is underused with respect to its promising potential, since, according to the experience of practitioners and researchers working with BIM, issues in the standard's implementation and use prevent its effective use. Nevertheless, a systematic investigation of these issues has never been carried out, and there is thus insufficient evidence for tackling the problems. The GeoBIM benchmark project is aimed at finding such evidence by involving external volunteers, reporting onin parallel, also with the aim of understanding whether one of the two offered more effective solutions that could possibly be borrowed by the other one in future developments. However, the final outcomes of the two different tasks are very specific for each standard and deserve to be presented and discussed separately, considering the specifics of each case. For these reasons, this article, which focuses on the results about the benchmark Task 1 (support for IFC), is written in tandem with Noardo et al. (2020c), which describes Task 3, covering the support for CityGML. In order to allow each article to be read on its own, the two articles share some information (i.e., Section 2 explaining the general context and motivation of the study; Section 3. 1 covering the initial part of the methodology about the entire GeoBIM benchmark set-up, and Section 3. 3 concerning some similarities in the methodology). One further article explores the parts of the project more directly related to the subject of integration, namely, conversion procedures and useful tools to georeference IFC models .

Unveiling the Actual Progress of Digital Building Permit: Getting Awareness through a Critical State of the Art Review

“…Step 4 -BIM modelling and IFC export -emerges in the graph in Figure 21 for counting mainly on A2 items, while the implementation is still weak. We could relate this also with other current research that investigates the IFC interoperability issues [158,159]. At the same time, Step 5 also contains references to the development of checking tools adopting several technologies.…”

An Inspection of IFC Models from Practice

“…As synthesized by Noardo et al [23], the open standard data model for BIM is the buildingSMART Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) [27]. It is intended to comprehensively cover the data requirements in many domains and use cases within the Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) and Facility Management (FM) fields, such as building components and processes, describing both physical and abstract concepts (e.g., cost, schedule, etc.…”

“…This semantic complexity is intended to represent faithfully the buildings as functional to the designed scope. However, the implementation and use of such theoretically precise models is difficult and can result in inaccuracies or the underuse of the most complex features, besides hindering interoperability by providing a very high degree of freedom to fill in the information in different ways and by choosing one of the many possible kinds of representations that can be used [23].…”

“…Interoperability is affected by the kind of modelling and geometry used, since software can implement only subsets of the allowed ones, to adopt different conventions for their description and coding (e.g., extrusion directions, Boolean operations, etc. ), or even to choose to support additional kinds of geometries with respect to the group identified in standard prescriptions [23].…”

“…However, some issues can still be encountered when producing [18,19] and exchanging standardized data among software and people (such as incompleteness of the models, inaccuracies, different semantics interpretations, geometry deformations) [20][21][22][23][24], which could prevent a smooth exchange of information as well as the use of data within automatic processing [25,26]. It is fundamental to overcome such problems and uncertainties to build interoperability on a solid base, for which the first step is the understanding of the state of the art.…”