Incremental model updates in BIM: a critical analysis of the collaboration platform Speckle

Current practice and international standards implement BIM collaboration based on domain model federation, which leads to repetitive exchange of model versions as monolithic files. Subsequently, stakeholders receiving new model versions must manually check them to identify potential impacts on their own disciplines, which is labor-intensive and error-prone. These limitations can be overcome by implementing incremental update procedures. This way, only the information about the modified objects is transmitted in the event of model changes. In this paper, we examine the collaboration platform Speckle and critically assess its approach to implementing incremental model updates. Speckle provides an open and vendor-neutral data format and is known for its extensibility. We address several issues that were identified in Speckle's hierarchical data structure concerning the insertion and removal of model objects. An improved data structure inspired by Labeled Property Graphs will be presented, enabling more intuitive updates of BIM models and facilitating more accurate version control by maintaining object relationships.