ST-6 CIS/2 - IFC Harmonization

CIS/2 is a mature, widely used product model for building structural steel. It address steel design, analysis, detailing, fabrication (manufacturing) and erection. CIS/2 has 15 well-developed application interfaces and is used daily in production projects. The business segment CIS/2 addresses has important interfaces (use cases) with the rest of the construction industry. Thus it makes a strong business case to facilitate interoperability between CIS/2 and IFC.

The benefits for harmonization include:

faster design and development of steel structures by architects
faster start-up of steel fabrication projects, by using IFC models as input
improved coordination between steel design and fabrication with all other building subsystems
quicker handling and management of changes, due to owner or coordination

Solution:

This project involves the review and extension of IFC, particularly ST-4 and ST-5, to support data exchange for the use cases identified below. The project is considered a fasttrack effort, within the Domain Layer only, anticipating no changes to IFC at the Interoperability or lower layers.

This effort is being undertaken with a parallel effort (not part of the project) to provide translator capabilities between the two product models.

Scope of work:

In Scope:

The following use cases are in scope of our effort:

passing of a contract-level model of a steel structure from the architect or contractor to the steel fabricator
exchange of a steel model at the fabrication level back to the architect/contractor for fabrication-level coordination
exchange of steel model data between architect and structural engineer, in both directions

These cases will recognize the growing (but not universal) condition where a structural modeling application may be used by the structural engineer to manage the analysis data and its relation to the physical (steel) model.

Out-of scope:

No attempt will be made to extend IFC to support a full steel fabrication-level model.

Project schedule

Project start month/year:	October, 2004
Targeted completion month/year:	June, 2005
Process model:	October 15, 2004
Domain model:	December, 2004
Pre integration:	January 2005
Integration:	February, 2005
Test data:	March, 2005

Project team
Participants	Chapter	Roles	Contact email

Supporting Activities

A primary supporting activity is the strong continued support for CIS/2 by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC). It includes the encouragement and technical support for application developers wishing to include CIS/2 translator capabilities extension of CIS/2 implementations to support complex workflows, and help in doing demonstration cases.

Other important parallel work will address the development of a translator mapping between CIS/2 entity instances and IFC entity instances, allowing the interoperability capabilities to be realized. This work is also funded by the AISC.

A joint advisory committee has been formed, comprised of potential users, IAI North American chapter members, and AISC Information Technology Committee members, who will oversee and review the work undertaken.

Project addresses

Project web site:
Project FTP site:
Project email:

Remarks

The project´s implementation requirement will be met by 15 existing CIS/2 applications and the IFC - CIS/2 translator developed separately under a project funded by AISC.

**Proposer :

First name: Charles
Family name: Eastman

Email:
chuck.eastman@coa.gatech.edu

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ST-6 CIS/2 - IFC Harmonization

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