IFC-Tunnel
Funding: IFC-Tunnel Funding Parties
Realization: André Borrmann (as Technical Lead), bSI IFC-Tunnel Project Team
Documentation: Requirements analysis report
Overview
Industry Foundation Classes(IFC) is a comprehensive data model allowing the detailed geometric and semantic description of buildings and is widely used as a software vendor-independent BIM data exchange standard. It is developed by the international non-profit organization buildingSMART and has been published as ISO standard 16739 since 2013. Up to version IFC4, the IFC standard was mainly focused on buildings. However, due to increasing international demand, a substantial extension of the standard to support infrastructure facilities is being carried out.
To this end, the Infrastructure Room, a subdivision of buildingSMART International (bSI) with its own steering committee, was founded in 2013. It developed a roadmap and started a number of projects to develop the necessary extensions. The first project was IFC-Alignment, which defined extensions for describing the alignment of linear infrastructure assets (Liebich et al. 2017). On this basis, the IFC Infra Overall Architecture project was conducted in order to specify general principles to be followed by all Infrastructure extension projects. On top of that, the projects IFC-Bridge, IFC-Rail, IFC-Road and IFC-Tunnel have been initiated.
In response to the urgent demand of international infrastructure stakeholders for extending IFC for tunnels, the standard development project was initiated in Octover 2019 by Infra Room as a fast-track project with a duration of 2 years. Due to the limited time and resources available, it was essential that the project focused on "low hanging" fruits; i.e. selecting use cases to be supported that bring the most value to the future users of the standard. The IFC-Tunnel extension project followed the formal project execution guidelines of bSI that came into effect in 2015 (buildingSMART International 2015). They define two essential components to be implemented by each project:
- the organizational structure,
- the development process.
The development process
As demanded by bSI guidelines, the IFC-Tunnel project implemented the following development phases:
- Requirements Analysis
- Taxonomy Analysis
- Conceptual model development
- IFC schema extension proposal (draft)
- Validation
- IFC schema extension proposal (final)
- Formal acceptance
Requirements Analysis
Phase 1 of the IFC-Tunnel project was fully dedicated to performing a comrehensive Requirements Analysis. To this end, the project team was formed by a large group of end-users from different speciality areas contributing to the requirments analysis report (RAR). The outcomes have been presented to and discussed with the international expert panel on a regular basis.