A Survey on Reasoning on Building Information Models Based on IFC

Building Information Models (BIM) are computer models that act as a main source of building information and integrate several aspects of engineering and architectural design, including building utilisation. They aim at enhancing the efficiency and the effectiveness of the projects during design, construction, and maintenance. Artificial Intelligence, which is used to automate tasks that would require intelligence, has found its way into BIM by applying reasoners, among other techniques. A reasoner is a piece of software that makes the implicit and hidden knowledge as explicit by using logical inferring techniques. Reasoners are applied on BIM to help take enhanced decisions and to assess the construction projects. The importance of BIM in both construction and information technology sectors has motivated many researchers to work on surveys that attempt to provide the current state of BIM, but unfortunately, none of these surveys has focused on reasoning on BIM. In this article we survey the research proposals and toolkits that rely on using reasoning systems on BIM, and we classify them into a two-level schema based on what they are intended for. According to our survey, reasoning is mainly used for solving design problems, and is especially applied for code consistency checking, with an emphasis on the semantic web technologies. Furthermore, user-friendliness is still a gap in this field and case-based reasoning, which was often applied in the past efforts, is still hardly applied for reasoning on BIM. The survey shows that this research area is active and that the research results are progressively being integrated into commercial toolkits.