BIMReason: Validating BIM model correctness

Abstract

Compliance inspections and building analysis are critical to the success of any construction project. At present, such assessments are primarily conducted manually by experts in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector resulting in a tedious, labor-intensive, and generally inefficient undertaking. Yet, with the gradual adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM), automated building analysis and compliance checking become feasible. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) has received a lot of traction in the AEC industry as a vendor-neutral data model. Its well-defined semantics can be exploited by reasoning engines that allow for semantic reasoning on building models, the core mechanism required for automated compliance checking and building analysis. In this paper, a general-purpose model checking framework for IFC building models, as well as an appropriate specification layout are introduced. Model checking via semantic reasoning is realized using various technologies from the Semantic Web. To present and evaluate our implementation, a sample specification is developed and tested on two IFC building models.