Advancements and Applications of Industry Foundation Classes Standards in Engineering: A Comprehensive Review

The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard has been widely implemented as an open data standard in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. IFC enables robust information representation and facilitates cross-disciplinary collaboration, serving as a critical data foundation for future intelligent development in the engineering field. However, current IFC research topics remain relatively fragmented, and there are still several challenges in the practical implementation of IFC. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive review of IFC research over the past two decades. The research progress is systematically summarized in three key areas: IFC applications, interoperability, and data processing. Through this review, the limitations in IFC development have been discussed, and future research directions are proposed. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive perspective on addressing data-related challenges in the AEC industry and contributes to facilitating the deep integration of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence within the AEC domain.