Collaborative engineering with IFC: new insights and technology

The concept of working in one central Building Information Model (BIM) is becoming increasingly popular. Reports in literature as well as industry practitioners describe the lack of good implementations for IFC import/export in current software tools. The so-called ‘round tripping’ of an IFC model cannot be performed without data loss, making the merging of data into one central data repository impractical. This feeds discussions about the workability of IFC in relation to a homogeneous software environment. In the Netherlands several experiments were conducted to research if IFC still meets the needs from the AEC industry. The observations and opinions from users refute current theories and perceptions on collaborations using IFC. This paper describes a collaboration process called ‘reference models’. User opinions from the research state that the use of IFC, in an suitable collaboration process, meets the needs of the industry even better than homogeneous proprietary software environments. Figure 1. The well know conceptual picture of the Shared Data Model [Beetz, et.al 2011] The sector however, driven by innovation, took the ‘shared data model ‘ in the middle as ‘shared data’ or ‘shared data repository’. This mix-up probably arose with the introduction of the term ‘BIM’ (Building Information Modeling or Building Information Model). The term BIM was used as a name for an instance of a data model. It is thought that non-technical users in the industry mixed up the ‘Shared Data Model’ (meaning IFC as a description of data structure) with an instance (data from a specific project) which was also called ‘model’ in the BIM-terminology. Driven by these pictures, and the similarity between building model and data model, the industry was flooded by the concept of working inside a central data repository. 2 MOTIVATION AND GOAL OF THE RESEARCH Lately, there seems to be a split between BIM user groups when it comes to the central model concept in the Netherlands. Roughly speaking there is, on the one hand, a group that strongly believes in working with a central data repository based on a single homogeneous software environment. On the other hand hand there are the believers of freedom for a project partner to choose its own software tools. This group also tends to believe in a shared data repository, but finds this has to be based on an open data model like IFC. We call these groups ‘homogeneous software environment’ and ‘plural data environment’. Both propagate arguments on different levels of technology, usability and efficiently. The most frequently heard arguments are discussed in the next two chapters. These discussions were usually about finding solutions for issues that were only raised by working with a central data repository. This raised the question to research if open BIM data standards like IFC meet the needs of the industry. To answer this question, multiple experiments were conducted in a practical environment. We specifically choose this research question because software providers are conducting their own research about user needs for working with their central data repository within their own single environment.