Research on IFC‐ and FDS‐Based Information Sharing for Building Fire Safety Analysis

Abstract

With the development of computer processors, vast numerical simulation tools are widely used by fire engineers to determine the spread of fire and smoke. However, the fire modeling practices are often highly time-consuming and cost-intensive especially for building geometry information which does limit the further implementation of building fire safety analysis. Although nowadays building information modeling (BIM) has become a buzzword in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) field to facilitate information integration and interoperability, data sharing and exchange are still weak in the traditional interoperability between BIM applications and fire simulation software, since the data schema of them are totally different. In this paper, a quick and accurate approach for information sharing for building fire safety analysis between mainstream BIM applications and widely used fire simulation software has been successfully implemented, based on Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS). And, both geometrical building information and sematic information can be shared by this approach through the transformation of coordinate systems, outer database, and IFC file extension. The BIM model restoring fire simulation results can support other performance-based design of building, such as structural fire-resistant design and evacuation design. And, all of the analysis results including building fire simulation, structure safety design, and evacuation simulation can be integrated in Autodesk Revit, establishing a framework of IFC- and FDS-based information sharing for building fire safety analysis successfully. A gymnasium has been taken as a case study to illustrate the capability of this framework.

Development of Data Integration and Sharing for Geotechnical Engineering Information Modeling Based on IFC

“…It is believed that BIM has triggered the second digital revolution in the field of engineering design and construction and promoted the transformation and upgrading of construction-related industries [6,7]. BIM technology exchanges various types of information of construction projects through an internationally used open data standard Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), which has been gradually considered as the most extensive data standard of BIM since its publication [8]. Due to its good scalability, IFC is an intermediary aimed at realizing crossdomain, cross-specialty, cross-stage, and cross-platform data interaction and sharing, and it is also the key to improve the collaborative operation of BIM system [9].…”

Dynamic optimisation of evacuation route in the fire scenarios of offshore drilling platforms

“…FDS+EVAC was often used to quantify the evacuation process and evacuation efficiency [18][19][20] or be compared with evacuation experiments [21][22][23] . Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been explored and integrated with FDS to evaluate the evacuation in case of fire [14,24,25] . Evacuation software tools such as STEPS [26] , Pathfinder [27] and SIMULEX [28] have also been combined with FDS to study the changes of critical factors in fire scenarios and analyze the process of evacuation affected by these factors.…”

Semantic IFC Data Model for Automatic Safety Risk Identification in Deep Excavation Projects

“…Thus, the IFC standard should be extended to meet specific project targets to ensure that the required engineering information is captured adequately and completely from certain system applications [16,17]. Based on the engineering characteristics of certain projects, efforts of IFC extension have been implemented in various fields (e.g., bridge [13,18], tunnel [19,20]), mainly focusing on construction management [21,22], cost estimation [23,24], seismic components [25], and design change management [26].…”