Development of Data Integration and Sharing for Geotechnical Engineering Information Modeling Based on IFC

With the rapid development of infrastructure construction, geotechnical engineering has always been worthy of attention due to its complexity and diversity. Accelerating the informatization of geotechnical engineering will contribute to the project management, but the information contained in geotechnical engineering cannot be well integrated because of the lack of unified data standards. Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been considered as an effective technology to manage information, and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) in BIM serves as a neutral and open standard for the exchange of information. However, it was found that BIM cannot express the information of some structure objects and geological objects well during the construction process of geotechnical engineering. Combined with the characteristics of geotechnical engineering, taking advantage of the good extensibility of IFC, this paper proposes a “Built-In Generation Schema” for geotechnical structure models and a “Plug-In Extension Schema” for three-dimensional (3D) geological models, ultimately forming the basic data system of geotechnical engineering information models based on IFC. Applying extended IFC to the modeling process, the BIM-based modeling method of geotechnical models is proposed. In addition, an IFC-based platform is developed to integrate geological models and structure models for further displaying and analyzing of geotechnical engineering models. The work in this paper provides a feasible way and technical support for promoting the integration and sharing of geotechnical engineering information and enhancing the multiprofessional collaborative work.