Manipulating IFC sub-models in collaborative teamwork environments

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of workflow management in collaborative teamwork environments, where multidisciplinary actors and software applications are involved. Design versions or variants may represent different development stages, partial designs or solution alternatives that need to be integrated together. The paper presents a novel approach to splitting and merging IFC sub-models (partial models) at different degrees of granularity away from the schema oriented approaches. It relies on an instance oriented approach (FIOPE) Flexible Instance Oriented Partial Exchange Environment, that enables end users ’ manipulation of the IFC model and consequently the contribution to the evolution of exchange patterns which can be formalised later to partial exchange schemata (e.g. EXPRESS-X ISO 10303 P-14). The process of comparing IFC/STEP models ’ tree structure is neither simple nor straightforward. Consequently, certain algorithms are developed to overcome the complexity of the IFC EXPRESS-ISO P-11 definition of the IFC model. A whole range of software tools for reading, visualizing, processing and writing IFC/STEP models have been developed to achieve the above interoperability aim.