Comparison of BIM Interoperability Applications at Different Structural Analysis Stages

Building information modeling (BIM) provides a novel way of information management for all lifecycle phases of a building project. It is facilitating the processes of a construction project, such as architectural design, structural analysis, and construction management. Industry foundation classes (IFC) is an open standard for information exchange between different BIM applications in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) domain. It represents project information in an interoperable way that contains geometric information, material information, and other physical and functional information needed of analyzing and managing a project. Structural analysis aims to simulate the structural performance of a building under different types of loads to make sure the structure is safe. The needed information for structural analysis mainly include geometric, material, and load information. These information come from architectural design and selected analysis scenarios. The information should be represented in an interoperable way to allow information transfer between different phases and different stakeholders. Information missing is a crucial problem during the interoperable use of BIM, which may cause misunderstandings between different stakeholders and therefore erroneous structural analysis result and misleading information to feed construction process later on. In this paper, the authors focus on analyzing the use of IFC at three stages in structural analysis, namely, intrinsic modeling stage, extrinsic modeling stage, and the analysis stage. The authors compared IFC files at these three stages with original BIM software text files in terms of information coverage, and identified information missing cases. This is the first systematic investigation of BIM interoperability at detailed work stages of structural analysis and provides insights in how BIM usage should be improved in this domain.