IFC Housing Configurator: Driving building automation with IFC using Graph technology

Synopsis:

Ever written an Ifc file by hand? I guess not. Let alone configure and generate an entire house.
We are using Ifc to develop Lego-like building blocks we can use to configure the content. Using the capabilities of the IfcProjectLibrary we’ll show you how to generate an Ifc residential house. Linking backend data to generated parametric Ifc content and a sneak peek at our IfcGraph model.

Learning Objectives:

1. Learn about the possibilities of an IfcGraph
2. See the implementation of an IfcProjectLibrary with parametric Ifc-Content
3. Find out about the addition of 2D drawing generation to an opensource IfcViewer

Body:

Over the past few years we at Bimforce have been diving deep into IFC. Writing IfcProjectLibrary files by hand to generate parametric Ifc content. Building custom database definitions and linking them to company datasources. We’ve learned a lot about how the IfcSchema works and what its possibilities are. They go way beyond the standard use cases of Ifc.
We wanted to expand the envelope even further and are developing a configurator to generate entire houses within Ifc and facilitate the entire process from initial plan to generating complete models. For this we developed what we call the IfcGraph

We’ll show the steps taken to go from the initial design to a fully-fledged IfcGraph and Data Model of the building.

-Develop massing studies directly in Ifc
-Have a client configurator for options
-Generate a complete Ifc model based upon client input and options
-Generate 2D drawings including annotation from the resulting Ifc Model
-Developing a IfcProjectLibrary with reusable parameteric Ifc Content
-Extract excerpts from the Ifc Model and data model for the construction site

We’ll take you by the hand and show you the way in which the Ifc Schema allows us to generate an entire building.
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