Toolchains for Interoperable BIM Workflows in a Web-Based Integration Platform

Abstract

The construction industry is characterized by the diversity of its processes, whereby persons involved in changing project communities are confronted with a changing interplay of software applications. Therefore, planning workflows, and especially the exchange of information between stakeholders, need to be formalized. The automation and execution of these workflows go one step further to achieve added value in implementation and project management using building information modeling. For the configuration and execution of collaborative BIM workflows with compatible software products, a framework is conceived and developed that enables the modeling of project-specific workflows by linking individual software tools based on a standardized process notation. The resulting toolchains enable seamless information exchange between applications that integrate an openCDE-compliant web interface. The methodological approach in this paper is a concept implementation, including a proof of concept. For the concept development, a review of the state of the art is conducted, and requirements are analyzed. The concept development comprises data models and API descriptions and includes the concept of a central integration platform. The interaction between workflow management on the platform and the execution of tasks in the software product clients is explained. The implementation of the toolchains on the proposed platform is evaluated in a demonstrator scenario.