Semantic BIM Reasoner for the Verification of IFC Models M
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Archive Ouverte en Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication Semantic BIM Reasoner for the verification of IFC Models M. Fahad, Bruno Fies, Nicolas Bus To cite this version: M. Fahad, Bruno Fies, Nicolas Bus. Semantic BIM Reasoner for the verification of IFC Models. 12th European Conference on Product and Process Modelling (ECPPM 2018), Sep 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark. 10.1201/9780429506215. hal-02270827 HAL Id: hal-02270827 https://hal-cstb.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02270827 Submitted on 26 Aug 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Paper published in: Proceedings of the 12th European conference on product and process modelling (ECPPM 2018), Copenhagen, Denmark, September 12-14, 2018, eWork and eBusiness in Architecture, Engineering and Construction - Jan Karlshoj, Raimar Scherer (Eds) Taylor & Francis Group, [ISBN 9781138584136] Semantic BIM Reasoner for the verification of IFC Models M. Fahad Experis IT, 1240 Route des Dolines, 06560 Valbonne, France N. Bus & B. Fies CSTB - Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment, 290 Route de Lucioles, 06560 Valbonne, France ABSTRACT: Recent years have witnessed the development of various techniques and tools for the building code-compliance of IFC models. Indeed these are great efforts, but, still there is a gap for the fully automatic building code-compliance. This paper presents our research and development of Semantic BIM Reasoner (SBIM-Reasoner) which employs semantic technologies to meet the requirements of semantic verification of an IFC model. SBIM-Reasoner employs several preprocessors (IFC to RDF converter, Geometry Extractor) to build the semantic repository from the input IFC model. Once all the triples are generated from the initial data (.ifc file), Stardog is used to build a knowledge graph for the semantic verification. All types of inference and reasoning mechanisms for the semantic verification are applied over this knowledge graph to meet the requirements of verification. Knowledge graph over triplets enables freedom of extending RDF based Semantic IFC model, creation of newer vocabulary and formation of newer rules, concatenation of triplets to build rules with condition and constraints over IFC data, dynamic reasoning over the triplets based on the initial data of IFC model, etc. Finally, we tested our prototype by using several online IFC models. We conclude that semantic technologies provide more rich mechanisms and answer vast types of queries for the verification of IFC models. It provides powerful features based on SPARQL libraries and serves best for the automated code compliance and verification of IFC models. 1 INTRODUCTION that ensures accurate, consistent and reliable results in the entire life-cycle of BIM. Verification Building Information Modeling1 (BIM) is to of IFC models for the code compliance checking is understand a building through the usage of a one of the hot challenges of the present decade. digital model which draws on a range of data Different approaches and tools are already assembled collaboratively before, during and after contributed for the automated code compliance construction [1]. BIM with its interoperability checking [4]. properties is intended to facilitate exchanges and Our enterprise, CSTB, through its research aims at handovers between different stakeholders. automating French Building Code Compliance as Whereas the visualization and geometric much as possible, or at least improves the control representation are intrinsic to the digital building of regulations from a digital model design phase. model, the fields of quality requirements, Its goal is to provide automatic requirements evaluation and regulatory contextualization verification to warn the non-conformities with the (destination, named areas, threshold values, associated 3D visualization, or to provide access to certified data, evidence of compliance, etc.) need the technical documentation for a given digital higher level of maturity [2]. Industry Foundation model based on its sophisticated contextual Classes (IFC), based on a neutral format, is a information. This paper presents our several complete and fully stable open and international contributions towards this research. First, we standard for exchanging BIM data [3]. Code analyze literature review regarding verification of Compliance checking of BIM is necessary in order IFC models and conclude that there are vast to provide stake-holders a high quality IFC model research works in this field, but still there are 1 Open BIM, http://www.buildingsmart.org/openbim/ many open challenges to address. Therefore, we SBIM-Reasoner, its architecture, subcomponents, present a need of an approach that can easily be and as a semantic service to end-users. This extended, configured and deployed for the section also presents our statistical analysis of our dynamic and changing environment having broad implemented prototype, empirical results based spectrum of functionalities for the verification of on various IFC models and highlights various IFC models. important points. Section 4 concludes the paper The main contribution of this paper is about the and presents future directions development of Semantic BIM Reasoner (SBIM- Reasoner) which employs semantic technologies to meet the requirements of semantic verification of an IFC model. SBIM-Reasoner employs several 2 RELATED WORK preprocessors (elaborated in next sections) to build the semantic repository based on RDF [25] Over the last few years, many methods and from the input IFC model. Once all the triples are techniques have been proposed for the generated from the initial data (.ifc file), it uses verification of IFC models. There are three ways Stardog2 to build a knowledge graph for the for the conformance checking of IFC models as semantic verification. All types of inference and discussed by Pauwels and Zhang [5]. The reasoning mechanisms for the semantic subsections elaborate each of them. verification are applied over this knowledge graph to meet the requirements of verification, and in 2.1 Hard Coded Rule Checking addition to discover additional information that is not explicitly stated in the initial data of the IFC First, we have the hard coded rule checking model. Our semantic preprocessor uses both mechanism for the verification of IFC models, forward chaining and backward chaining which is similar to the approach adopted by Solibri mechanisms (where appropriate) to build the Model Checker [6]. This tool loads a BIM model, semantic repository. SPARQL3 rules (statements considers rules stored natively in the application and materialization) are applied to enrich the and performs rule checking against the BIM for the underlying semantic repository with several architectural design validations. This approach is newer and high level concepts as per demand of fast as rules are integrated inside the application, regulation texts and verification rules by the end- but there is no flexibility or customization possible users. Finally, SPARQL queries are performed over as rules are not available outside the actual the semantic repository for the verification and application. code compliance of an IFC model. Once, SBIM- The traditional approach of compliance checking is Reasoner finds non-compliant objects in the IFC with the IfcDoc tool [7] developed by model, it presents them to the end-user. Later in buildingSMART International for generating this paper, we also present our analytical results MvdXML rules through a graphical interface. It is on several online IFC models4 and also on four IFC based on the MvdXML specification [22] to models developed at our enterprise. We discuss improve the consistent and computer- our experimental finding on different analysis interpretable definition of Model View Definitions parameters such as number of triplets in the RDF as true subsets of the IFC Specification with (turtle file) equivalent to IFC model, number of enhanced definition of concepts. This tool is triplets in the semantic model (filtered turtle file) widely used as AEC specific platform in the in the Stardog, estimated time taken by the construction industry. MvdXML Checker [27] is a conversion and geometric preprocessor, etc. On great contribution for the automatic verification of the basis of analysis from these parameters, we IFC models and to detect the non-conformities show encouraging results by several tests on the knowledge graph from the initial version of SBIM- with the associated 3D visualization, or to provide Reasoner. access to the technical documentation for a given The rest of paper is organized as follows. Section 2 digital model based on its sophisticated contextual discusses related work. Section 3 presents our information. At our enterprise, we proposed 2 Stardog triplestore: https://www.stardog.com/ 4 IFC test Data 3 SPARQL http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-SPARQL-query/ https://github.com/opensourceBIM/TestFiles/tree/master/T estData/data several extensions