Research On BIM-based Construction Project Text Information Integration Management

A great amount of semi-structured or unstructured information are generated in the lifecycle of every construction project, and a large percentage of unstructured project information is collected and transferred in text format. Because the construction industry has a loose industrial structure and each construction project contains multiple construction phases and involves multi-disciplinary fields, so the massive volume construction data come from multiple information sources and is stored dispersedly. Currently, the construction information of every construction stage is managed separately, which not only makes project participants difficult to exchange information with others, but also usually leads to the loss of information in the process of transferring information. Thus as a result, the utilization ratio of construction information is very low.Due to the advent of Building Information Modeling (BIM) the traditional way of building information representation is shifted to a model-oriented approach where the building information is stored in a commonly shared comprehensive building information model. BIM serves as a shared model according to the specific projects, covering the total project lifecycle, and the text information is produced in the whole lifecycle and often attached to related building component objects, So this paper proposes to utilize the shared project model created by BIM to facilitate the integration of decentralized project text information, and therefore high efficiency of construction text information management can be achieved.Based on the analysis of the relevant theory knowledge of BIM and the data exchange standard (industry foundation class, IFC), combining the characteristics of construction information, the existing problems in text information management and the cause of these problems, this paper deeply analyzes the values of BIM-based text information integration management. Then the BIM-based project document information integration method is studied.At first, this paper elaborates a methodology to integrate project text documents in BIM-based system, which is composed of three main steps:First, project documents are classified by using the method of vector space model. Then, the API provided by Revit is used to extract the model object property information, which can be used for creating the query vector. By evaluating the similarity between the query vector and document vector, the most similar documents are retrieved. Finally, the relevant documents can be associated with their related project objects using an external resource reference to realize the integration of text information and project model.After that this paper constructs a BIM-based text information integration management system, and a realization platform of text information integration system is introduced in detail, including database technique, integrated development environment (IDE), the secondary development tool of Autodesk Revit, and the parsing tools of IFC.Finally, a slab is used as an example to validate the feasibility of using Revit API to extract the model object property information. IFC JAVA TOOLBOX, which is a parsing tool of IFC based on Java platform, is used to establish the link between the slab and the relevant documents. And the Revit platform is used to visualize the associated process.