Processing of Topological BIM Queries using Boundary Representation Based Methods

Building Information Models (BIM) are comprehensive digital representations of buildings, which provide a large set of information originating from the different disciplines involved in the design, construction and operation processes. Moreover, accessing the data needed for a specific downstream application scenario is a challenging task in large-scale BIM projects. Several researchers recently proposed using formal query languages for specifying the desired information in a concise, well-defined manner. One of the main limitations of the languages introduced so far, however, is the inadequate treatment of geometric information. This is a significant drawback, as buildings are inherently spatial objects and qualitative spatial relationships accordingly play an important role in the analysis and verification of building models. In addition, the filters needed in specific data exchange scenarios for selecting the information required can be built by spatial objects and their relations. The lack of spatial functionality in BIM query languages is filled by the Query Language for Building Information Models (QL4BIM) which provides metric, directional and topological operators for defining filter expressions with qualitative spatial semantics. This paper focuses on the topological operators provided by the language. In particular, it presents a new implementation method based on the boundary representation of the operands which outperforms the previously presented octree-based approaches. The paper discusses the developed algorithms in detail and presents extensive performance tests. 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is anopenaccess article under the CCBY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).