Model-server-based integration for buildings and municipal infrastructure

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The construction industry is undergoing a fundamental shift towards building information models (BIM)--systems based on comprehensive semantic data models of construction projects. BIM technology allows smarter design and analysis tools, which are now emerging into industrial practice. More significantly, BIM allows much greater information collaboration by enabling all users to share project information through a common shared project data model. Yet industrial uptake of BIM-based interoperability remains minimal, largely because it usually relies on file-sharing to exchange information. This is appropriate where the output of one application is used as input to another, but it cannot support full-scale integration where multiple users concurrently work on multiple versions of different views of a shared project data model. The solution is to implement the BIM model--in the form of the standard Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs)--in a database specialized for supporting large, complex data models of engineering projects: a model-server system. The PI has recently received a CFI awards to acquire a model-server test bed for our model-based building and municipal infrastructure research. Using this test bed, the objective of this research is to overcome the technical and organizational challenges to enable full scale BIM interoperability. The particular focus is on three application areas that each extends the traditional scope of BIM technology: integration of project management information; integration of municipal infrastructure management information, and integration of information to support sustainable construction practices. Three PhD students will each interact with industrial partners on full-scale projects to identify the specific work process targets, extend the IFCs as necessary to model the required data, build prototype interfaces between the model-server and the relevant industrial software applications, carry out exhaustive interoperability testing, and prepare the results in the form of best practices following our previously-developed project information management methodologies.