The increasing importance of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the transportation infrastructure demands a holistic approach for a vendor-neutral format that supports the exchange of geometric and semantic data adapted to infrastructure assets. To target this goal, the ISO-standard 16739-1, which contains the schema of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) addressing the buildings sector, will be replaced by the new version of IFC4x3 in 2023 that has been extended to meet the requirements of transportation infrastructure facilities. Until now, research has not focused on comparing the previous most common version (IFC2x3) and the new (IFC4x3) release at the scale of data modeling in practical projects. This work addresses this scientifically uncharted task in two steps. The first part compares the documentations of IFC2x3 and IFC4x3 concerning their definitions related to infrastructure assets. The second step contains a case study involving the metro line project Ümraniye-Atasehir-Göztepe in Istanbul. In the scope of this work, an evaluation tool is developed to investigate how information is generally represented in the IFC2x3 models. Parts of a tunnel model are remodeled, then exported to IFC4x3 and finally reanalyzed using the developed tool. The results show improvements with IFC4x3 in object placements, semantics implementation, geometric representation as well as a higher flexibility in the hierarchic structure. This leads to an enhanced basis for downstream tasks in the BIM process but requires adaptions in software and expertise among users.     «

The increasing importance of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the transportation infrastructure demands a holistic approach for a vendor-neutral format that supports the exchange of geometric and semantic data adapted to infrastructure assets. To target this goal, the ISO-standard 16739-1, which contains the schema of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) addressing the buildings sector, will be replaced by the new version of IFC4x3 in 2023 that has been extended to meet the requirements of tr...     »