Coverage-Accounted, Provenance-Aware Validation of IFC Building Models for Public Safety Management

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) files are the main deliverable for the digital safety management of public buildings, but a file that passes a schema check is not necessarily usable. Most checking tools reduce model quality to a single pass/fail result, blame the model for rules that do not apply or are themselves wrong, and drop the objects they could not process. We present a validation framework that keeps these questions distinct: it checks each element separately against the IFC4 schema and the project’s information requirements; reports one of seven verdict states that distinguishes model defects from inapplicable, unspecified, or defective requirements; accounts for every element so that none disappears from the audit; and labels all simplified geometry as authored or derived. Applied to eight production models from two authoring pipelines (5994 elements; 88,499 element–rule pairs), the verdicts were reproducible, agreed with an independent oracle on all 39,334 pairs it could decide, and detected eight of ten injected defect types in every case. Separating the two checks reclassified 274 valid elements of one model from violations to rule gaps, and every model from one pipeline arrived without authored axes. The framework supports procurement-side quality assurance and data-readiness screening for aging public buildings.