Automated Extraction of Information from Building Information Models into a Semantic Logic-Based Representation

One of the major goals of building information modeling (BIM) is to support automated compliance checking (ACC). To support ACC, project information (i.e., building design information) needs to be extracted from BIM models and transformed into a representation that would allow for automated reasoning about those project/design information in combination with information from regulatory documents. However, existing BIM information extraction (IE) efforts are limited in supporting complete automation of ACC. Complete automation of ACC requires (1) automating both the extraction of information from BIM models and the extraction of regulatory information from regulatory documents and (2) aligning the instances of information concepts and relations extracted from a BIM model with those extracted from regulatory documents, in order to facilitate direct automated reasoning about both information for compliance assessment. To address this gap, this paper proposes an automated BIM IE method for extracting project information from industry foundation classes (IFC)-based building information models (BIMs) into a semanticbased logic representation that is aligned with a matching semantic-based logic representation of regulatory information. The proposed BIM IE method utilizes semantic natural language processing (NLP) techniques and java standard data access interface (JSDAI) techniques to automatically extract project information from IFCbased BIMs and transform it into a logic format (logic facts) that is ready to be automatically checked against logic-represented regulatory rules. The BIM IE method was tested on extracting project/design information from a Duplex Apartment BIM model. Compared to a manually developed gold standard, the testing results showed a 100% precision and a short time of 15.02 seconds for processing 38898 lines of data. The published version is found in the ASCE Library here: http://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/9780784479247.022 The program can be downloaded here: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~jyb5534/resources/ZE_BIM_FOL_Converter.zip