HETEROGENEOUS DATA PROCESSING TO SUPPORT BIM INTEROPERABILITY AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT IN THE ARCHITECTURE, ENGINEERING, AND CONSTRUCTION (AEC) DOMAIN

Recent years have witnessed the exponential growth of the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry, especially in its capability to generate, collect and process data in the life cycle of a construction project. In the AEC domain, there are many tasks, including architectural design, structural analysis, and construction management, to name a few. Therefore, the identification of the knowledge gaps between AEC tasks or within one task is important to help develop solutions to support various AEC applications (e.g., construction monitoring). Advances in scientific data collection, the new generation of sensor systems, such as radio frequency tags and bar codes, have generated a flood of data to support information management in the construction domain. As the construction industry is adapting to new computer technologies in terms of hardware and software, heterogeneous data is becoming more and more available for access to bridge the gaps in the construction domain (e.g., Building Information Modelling (BIM) interoperability) and facilitate construction tasks (e.g., construction document information extraction). BIM is an integrated informational process and plays a key role in enabling efficient planning and control of a project in the AEC domain. Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) provides a useful data structure for BIM data communication and exchange. IFC-based BIM allows building information to be more interoperable among different BIM applications. BIM interoperability refers to the ability of two separate software programs or management systems to communicate and exchange information/data with each other. The advantage of BIM interoperability offers the seamless information/data transfer, and it could abstract necessary information/data, remove redundancy and duplicate information/data at the early design phase of the construction project. IFC-based BIM models are the models of buildings using the open IFC international standard which by itself is extensible. The BIM interoperability problem is both a technical problem and a management problem. From the technical dimension, it is focused on the software workflows which use different BIM applications. From the management dimension, it is reflected in the actual use of information/data between architectural design and structural analysis processes in the AEC domain. To address that, the author focused on exploring information missing and/or information inconsistency between different BIM applications as the gap-driven analysis, and discussed it from both technical and management dimensions. In addition, to support information management and facilitate different tasks and applications in the construction domain, the author explored the deeper information needs of construction applications from construction monitoring perspective, provided the solutions [e.g., ontological model, and information extraction (IE) method] to better manage construction site information to support construction monitoring applications.