BIMReason - Validating BIM Model Correctness

Inspections for compliance and building analysis are critical to the success of anyconstruction endeavor. At present, such assessments are primarily conducted manuallyby experts in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector resulting ina tedious, labor-intensive, and generally ineffective undertaking. Yet, with the gradualadoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM), automated building analysis and compliancechecking become feasible. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), in particular,has received a lot of traction in the AEC industry as a vendor-neutral data model.Its well-defined semantics can be exploited by reasoning engines that allow for semanticreasoning on building models, the core mechanism required for automated compliance checkingand building analysis. In this paper, a general-purpose model-checking framework for IFC buildingmodels, as well as an appropriate specification layout are introduced. Model-checking viasemantic reasoning is realized using various technologies from the Semantic Web. To showcaseand evaluate our implementation, a sample specification is developed and tested on two IFCbuilding models.