ASSESSMENT OF BUILDING INFORMATION MODELING FOR STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS DOMAIN

The advent of information technology in the construction industry has prompted a gradual shift from manual paper-based processes to computer-aided design and production. In this shift, there has been an increasing interest in the application of building information modelling (BIM). BIM has emerged as one of the most promising developments in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. One of the main obstacles in full BIM implementation is interoperability. The dependence of the industry on proprietary software for exchange of data constitutes the main cause of interoperability. To achieve seamless interoperability among various team members of a project, it is crucial that we make use of vendor neutral tools and software for communication among project team members. In this paper, based on the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard, a framework was developed to adapt architectural information directly for extracting information for structural domain. To meet this objective, a study was performed to determine the relationships and differences of data to be handled between the architectural and structural domains. A general algorithm for generation of structural information from IFC compatible architectural model was presented with a descriptive example.