The Critical Role of Accessible Data for BIM-Based Automated Rule Checking Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a concept of an accessible BIM database that supports integration with geometry enabling simplified and efficient queries of the IFC-based building model. The simplified schema, BIMRL, is shown to be significantly effective for the purpose of an implementation of an automated BIM-based rule checking system. The schema has been shown to successfully work in both traditional RDBMS and the NoSQL graph database. It complements a missing piece in the current research of automated rule checking, which mostly focuses on the formulation and representation of computable rules involving logic, checking algorithm, and parameterization. Even though these present approaches have largely assumed that data is available and easily accessible from a building model, this assumption is typically infeasible in a real-world implementation. Building rules require not only base data explicitly available in the model but also higher level semantic concepts that typically involve multiple relationships and spatial operations, which cannot be captured explicitly in the model. Without addressing this issue, a rule checking system will severely underperform and will be filled with opaque algorithms that act as black-boxes.