6533b7d8fe1ef96bd126a403

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Managing IFC for civil engineering projects

subject

description

The "Industrial Foundation Classes" (IFC) are an ISO norm to define all components of a building in a civil engineering project. IFC files are textual files whose size can reach 100 megabytes. Several IFC files can coexist on the same civil engineering project. Due to their size, their handling and sharing is a complex task. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically identify business objects in the IFC files and simplify their visualization and manipulation on the Internet. We construct an IFC Viewer which transforms the IFC file into a XML IFC tree manipulated through the 3D visualization of the building. The IFC Viewer composed a web-based platform called ACTIVe3D BUILD SERVER. This platform lets geographically dispersed project participants-from architects to electricians-directly use and exchange project documents in a centralized virtual environment during the life cycle of a civil engineering project.