The Role of IFC for Sustainable BIM Data Management

As the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) was introduced to exchange data between different BIM (Building Information Modeling) applications, construction professionals speculated how effectively it would solve the interoperability issues between these applications. Although previous investigations have demonstrated some limitations of the IFC in terms of exchanging the geometry of the components in the BIM data, no full understanding of these differences in the IFC code level has been provided yet. This paper presents the preliminary outcome of our investigation on the differences between the IFC codes of the same components created using different BIM applications such as Revit Architecture and ArchiCAD. This preliminary investigation sustain the BIM data for the building’s lifecycle.