Performance of different (BIM/IFC) exchange formats within private collaborative workspace for collaborative work

Abstract

This paper reports on research work done to incorporate an end user private workspace for each stakeholder in a collaborative BIM (Building Information Modelling) environment using a central model server. It focuses on reducing the complexity and improving the performance of obtaining IFC early binding runtime objects from stored persistent models. The paper discusses and describes the various types of object-relational mappings between the IFC express schemata and relational databases. The paper also presents the results of examining the possible serialization and de-serialization of IFC objects. An IFC ISO 10303 STEP-21, IFC XML 2X3 parsers and interpreters in addition to STEP-21 writer were developed by the author to be able to conduct the analysis in this paper. Comparative results and developed techniques to reach better performance are described. In order to inform the reader about the context of this research work and the underlying motivation, the paper presents the main interoperability aims and the rationale behind this work.