DEVELOPING IFC FOR INFRASTRUCTURE: A CASE STUDY OF THREE HIGHWAY ENTITIES

Abstract. Modern cities pay particular attention to upscale their infrastructure systems in order to improve the every-day life of their citizens and lead the way towards a more sustainable environment. As part of this, they invest extensive funds in large infrastructure projects which are challenging to deliver as they require an e efficient communication among different professions, in order to share information efficiently throughout the lifecycle of the project, thus highlighting the importance of standardization to maintain consistency and integrity during data exchange. Building Information Modelling (BIM) aims to facilitate the above-mentioned requirements by describing the life-cycle of the project and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is the Standard for BIM that enables an efficient storage, management, exchange and visualization of information. However, there are two important challenges that need to be addressed: (i) IFC focuses particularly on buildings and provides limited support for infrastructure elements and (ii) the information exchange aims to describe mostly the construction phase; highlighting the lack of classes that refer to the operation and maintenance phase. Within this context, this paper proposes the extension of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) for Asset Management in Infrastructure. A method is developed based on a case study of three highway entities: (i) retaining wall, (ii) gantry and (iii) bridge and a conceptual extension is presented. The results are further discussed and recommendations regarding future research fields are proposed.