ABGS: A System for the Automatic Generation of Building Information Models from Two-Dimensional CAD Drawings

Abstract

Building Information Modeling (BIM) refers to 3D-based digital modeling of buildings and infrastructure for efficient design, construction, and management. Governments have recognized and encouraged BIM as a primary method for enabling advanced construction technologies. However, BIM is not universally employed in industries, and most designers still use Computer-Aided Design (CAD) drawings, which have been used for several decades. This is because the initial costs for setting up a BIM work environment and the maintenance costs involved in using BIM software are substantially high. With this motivation, we propose a novel software system that automatically generates BIM models from two-dimensional (2D) CAD drawings. This is highly significant because only 2D CAD drawings are available for most of the existing buildings. Notably, such buildings can benefit from the BIM technology using our low-cost conversion system. One of the common problems in existing methods is possible loss of information that may occur during the process of conversion from CAD to BIM because they mainly focus on creating 3D geometric models for BIM by using only floor plans. The proposed method has an advantage of generating BIM that contains property information in addition to the 3D models by analyzing floor plans and other member lists in the input design drawings together. Experimental results show that our method can quickly and accurately generate BIM models from 2D CAD drawings.