COMBINE – Concurrent Multi-Viewpoint Building Information Modeling

The processes in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) and Facility Management (FM) industries are iterative – components are created, revised or discarded. There are many stakeholders with a multitude of domain-specific requirements and tools – for calculation, information visualisation and exchange, using a variety of standards (e.g. DXF, STEP, IFC, COLLADA, XML, etc.). This makes efficient and timely communication critical. The project COMBINE explores some of its requirements, such as selectivity in the communication, domain-specific adaptation to changes as well as monitoring and versioning, with a particular focus on the loss- and corruption-free translation between standards. The challenges this translation has to address are, among others, the rapid development of new technologies and the relatively slow adaptation of the relevant standards, the varying and disparate levels of detail across standards, and the lack of common ontological platform. The project COMIBINE aims to apply the tools of multilevel model driven development in the search for ontological similarities between standards on various meta-levels. It examines the methods of extracting semantics not only from the formal specification but also from the artefacts of a standard. Finally, it examines visualization techniques that enable the understanding and development of complex multilevel modelling hierarchies.

Term

01.02.2017 - 31.01.2020

Funding

TU Wien (Innovative Projekte), project number 1438717

Partner

Prof. Thomas Bednar (TU Wien)