Investigating the applicability of IFC in geospatial environment in order to facilitate the fire response management process

Abstract

Some urban management tasks such as disaster management, delivery of goods and services, and cityscape visualisation are managed by using a GIS as the current state-of-art, as the tasks in these processes require high level and volume of integrated geospatial information. Several of these tasks such as fire response management also require detailed geometrical and semantic information about buildings in the form of geospatial information. This paper presents research focused on investigating whether the process of fire response management can be facilitated through the implementation of an IFC model in the geospatial environment. In the first phase of the research, a use case scenario is developed in order to investigate the possible use of IFC models in a fire response management process. In the next phase, software components are developed to transfer the required level of form and semantic information from the IFC model to the geospatial environment. The developed software components are then verified through unit and component testing and validated through system testing and semi-structured interviews. The paper first summarises the background on Building Information Modelling and the role of GIS in fire response management. The development of the use case scenario and the software components are then explained before finally summarising the validation and verification efforts.

Keywords: IFC, fire response, BIM, GIS, geospatial