Automatic Integrity Checking of IFC Models relative to building Regulations

Regulations play an important role in assuring the integrity of the Building Information Model (BIM) in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) project. Regulation based BIM model checking is widely used in many disciplines. It can ensure the model meets users' various requirements or detect the potential defects. However, the correctness of checking result is not certainly guaranteed because of the incompleteness of model, the ambiguity of regulation etc. IFC has become an open international standard for BIM data that is exchanged and shared among software applications used by various participants in building construction or facility management project. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically check the integrity of IFC models relative to various building regulations. It can check comprehensively whether the information required by the regulation is contained in the model, demonstrating the problem elements. The standard IFC format of BIM models are considered. Given a building regulation, we first describe it formally by logic formulas, then extract an OWL model form IFC and generate corresponding SPARQL queries to check the information integrity. We propose several optimization strategies on the style of generated SPARQL queries and its execution flow, which can improve the time efficiency and deal with large-scale applications. A prototype has been implemented and used in the BIM models of a real building project in China. Our method found out many problems on the information integrity of construction BIM automatically, which helped to reduce the manual efforts on checking and ensure the correctness of construction BIM.