Invariant signatures of architecture, engineering, and construction objects to support BIM interoperability between architectural design and structural analysis

There has been an increasing demand in building information modeling (BIM) for structural analysis. However, model exchange between architectural software and structural analysis software, which is an essential task in a construction project, is not fully interoperable yet. Various studies showed missing information and information inconsistency problems during conversion of models between different software; the lack of foundational methods enabling a seamless BIM interoperability between architectural design and structural analysis is evident. To address this gap and facilitate more use of BIM for structural analysis, the authors develop invariant signatures for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) objects and propose a new data-driven method to use invariant signatures for solving practical problems in BIM applications. The invariant signatures and the data-driven method were tested in developing the interoperable BIM support tool for structural analysis through an experiment. Ten models were created/adopted and used in this experiment, including five models for training and five models for testing. An information validation and mapping algorithm was developed based on invariant signatures and training models, which was then evaluated in the testing models. Compared with a manually created gold standard, results showed that the desired structural analysis software inputs were successfully generated using the algorithm with high accuracy. The invariant signatures of AEC objects can therefore be expected to serve as the foundation of seamless BIM interoperability.