Research on the Technical Integration of Heterogeneous Materials into Building Information Modeling

Different modeling softwares have different functions. They have their own various advantages in the fields of software architecture, operation interface, attribute definition and description, view presentation, supported file format, report generation or construction drawing. In the process of collaborative design for complex structures or large projects, most designers choose their familiar tools to create the products. Because different softwares have always different definitions of object attributes and file formats, they are not compatible that makes it not easy to integrate the works constructed by different designers. This is a problem of what has since become common in the process of project collaboration, so how to integrate heterogeneous models is vitally important for constructing architectural information. Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), an Open Information Exchange Standard for Building Information Modeling (BIM), provides document format specification and structure description method. It aims to achieve fast and high-fidelity model construction. This paper proposes a method to integrate heterogeneous materials and models constructed by different softwares, transform formats and attributes with IFC standards, and then integrate and display results with ArchiCAD software. The integrity and repair feasibility of information exchange in the process of conversion are the main topics of this paper.