Publications / 2021 Proceedings of the 38th ISARC, Dubai, UAE
Prefabrication is regarded as the first level of industrialization in the construction industry. A unified 4D information model with good interoperability is the key issue to realize effective project management of prefabricated buildings. This paper intends to promote prefabricated buildings' management by developing an IFC-based framework to institute a unified 4D information model and realize its interoperability in Graph Database. The framework consists of three parts. The first part is to establish a unified IFC-based 4D construction management information model of prefabricated buildings. The prefabricated building information model is extended based on the IFC schema, including the extension of schedule information, resource information, and cost information. The second part is twinning the obtained information model into a graph database via Neo4j. The third part consists of strategies to interoperate, verify, and visualize the IFC-based information model based on the graph database. A prefabricated engineering case verifies that the proposed framework's feasibility. This framework can be extended to the nD and lays the foundation of IFC-based digital twin and thus could favorably contribute to the development of prefabricated buildings.