Intelligent Generation of Bill of Quantity from IFC Data Subject to Chinese Standard

In the current way for construction cost estimating by using application software in China, the generation of bill of quantity usually needs plenty of manual work, because the design results cannot be used directly. BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology has provided a potential approach to generating bill of quantity more efficiently by utilizing the computable and reusable information which is available from the 3D design results. However, while several commercial application software have already existed in foreign countries, no BIM-based software in this aspect has been developed in China. In addition, the existing BIM-based application software cannot be directly used in China because they do not support Chinese standards. In this paper, through analyzing the related Chinese standard, a discrimination model for bill of quantity (short for BQ) items was established and the corresponding rule database and semantic database were created. Then the IFC-based discrimination model for BQ items was established and the mechanism of intelligent generation of bill of quantity from IFC data was formulated. Finally the mechanism was programmed and verified through an actual project. As a conclusion, the established mechanism can not only be applied to the development of BIM-based construction cost estimating application software subject to Chinese standard, but also can be referred to develop IFC-based construction cost estimating application software for different countries.