Feasibility and Fidelity of Data Exchange Through IFC for Building Commissioning

The building commissioning (BC) ensures that the various interacting systems in a building are properly installed and operating. It is a process requiring extensive data exchange among different participants across multiple project phases. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), a widely supported data exchange standard in the building industry, can play an important role in building commissioning by enabling interoperability among building commissioning, architectural design and facility management tools. In this paper, we explore whether the current IFC release can meet the requirements of the building commissioning. We consider several BC-related test cases to show how well the IFC can support the BC-related data exchange and discuss what extensions to the current IFC are desired.