IFC Monitor - An IFC schema extension for modeling structural health monitoring systems

The pervasive emergence of sensing technologies for structural health monitoring (SHM) and the digitalization ubiquitous in engineering (“Industry 4.0”) pose increasing demands on information modeling concepts in civil engineering. While in building information modeling (BIM) conventional building information (such as geometry, material, or cost) can precisely be described using current modeling standards, information about SHM systems, referred to as “monitoring-related information”, cannot be fully described on a well-defined, formal basis. In this paper, a BIM-based approach towards describing monitoring-related information is proposed, using the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), an open BIM standard facilitating the interoperability of BIM models, as a formal basis. First, possibilities and constraints of describing monitoring-related information with the IFC schema are discussed. Then, information necessary to describe SHM systems is integrated into a semantic model serving as a technology-independent metamodel. Next, the IFC schema is extended to enable BIM-based descriptions of SHM systems in compliance with IFC modeling capabilities, which is referred to as “IFC Monitor” schema. The IFC Monitor schema is verified with test software used in the official IFC certification program. For validation, a prototype SHM system is formally described using the IFC Monitor schema. The validation aims at checking if the IFC Monitor schema is capable of precisely describing monitoring-related information. As will be shown in this paper, the description of the prototype SHM system meets the requirements of a well-defined IFC model as specified in the official IFC certification program. As a result, the IFC Monitor schema proposed in this study advances BIM-based descriptions of SHM systems in association with structural systems being monitored on a well-defined, formal basis.