Collaborative engineering with IFC and BCF: managing openings and recesses

In a BIM data flow, an essential part of the coordination between disciplines is the agreement on recesses and openings in building elements. Different disciplines will request recesses and openings in elements that are managed and maintained by others. Using the full dataset of the elements has proven to be inoperable because of the information overload, interoperability problems and contradictions in the commonly used downstream dataflow. A group of companies has been experimenting with the exchange of data that only consists of the requested openings and recesses in IFC. Coordination is being done using BCF. This approach has been fine-tuned and adjusted during several projects. This paper describes the current status of that initiative and discusses the challenges that are still open.