Future Trends in Computer Systems Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) for Data Interchange for Cities Sustainability and Resilience

Sustainability and resilience represent large, complex, and important systemic issues that both rely on interoperability to solve environmental, social, and economic issues in the built environment. Interoperability is an important subject of study and development in the architectural, engineering, construction (AEC), and facilities management industries. A model-based approach to interoperability necessitates industry-wide standardization of information structures. To offer this data sharing standard, the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) were created. Although the technology for transferring data via IFC has been created, many areas such as modularisation of IFC, normalization of the IFC trees and relations, language independency of the base data structure, and so on still require further research and improvements before complete interoperability solutions can be achieved across domains. At the core of this literature review paper which examines the IFC schema and future developments that are expected of the IFC 5 and ‘IFC x’ is the modularization of the IFC schema which will provide interoperability between domains, others include better linkage of BIM and GIS, and the integration of IoT into BIM. The three functions that the MVDs now perform include defining a subset of IFC required to fulfill a purpose (comparable to information delivery specification; IDS), adding restrictions to that subset, and defining an expected level of implementation in software (comparable to conformance level). In IFC 5 such functions should be enhanced further into distinct, coordinated projects. Modularization will make this easier by establishing a common (interoperability) layer in the schema that will serve as a foundation for the modules. The developments of IFC 5 will make the IFC schema modular to improve maintenance, provide more stable implementations, increase release cycle predictability, and reduce the time between release and tool availability.