Research On Chinese Construction Document Classification System Combined With IFC Standard

Increasing adoption of communications and information technology in the construction industry promotes the information sharing, coordination and collaboration among the project organizations, and the research and application of building information modeling (BIM) are paid more attention. Building information modeling contains the information emerges from all phases of project cycle and provides a platform for the communication and information sharing among various project organizations. The realization of the platform requires not only BIM, but also a universal data exchange standard for the whole industry. The industry foundation classes (IFC) standard which was established by the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) is now accepted by the ISO and becomes the industrial data exchange standard.In Chinese construction domain, a great amount of information are expressed by Chinese documents. Standardized document classification is very important for the information communication and sharing among the project organizations.This paper studies Chinese document classification method combined with IFC standard and integrates the classification result to BIM, which realizes Chinese construction documents classification and management.Firstly, the paper makes a literature review about the research on BIM and document management in construction domain, following with a detailed introduction about BIM and IFC standard. The current applications and several problems are also pointed out.Secondly, the paper analyzes the characteristics of the project management and the traditional document management method, proposes the weakness of the traditional document management method and emphasizes the urgency of adopting new method to meet the current requirement. The paper then puts forward a method to classify the construction documents by transforming unstructured Chinese documents into structured ones based on document vector. The vector is attained by the procedure of unstructured Chinese document preprocessing, term extracting and term weighting. IFC entity vector can be formed in a similar way. Similarity calculation between IFC entity vector and document vector is conducted to make the documents classified. Then the classification result is associated to IFC entities.Thirdly, the paper explores the way to integrate the classification result to BIM. The necessary software and tools to realize the integration are introduced. The classification stage, retrieval stage and database preparation stage are described in detail. After that, a schema for the Chinese document classification management system in construction domain combined with IFC standard is proposed.Eventually, the paper conducts an experiment to test the proposed classification method. The experiment result proves that the proposed method is feasible. The paper then designs the structure of the information sharing system and illustrates the feasibility of the Chinese construction document classification management system combined with IFC standard. This research lays a foundation for further system development.