Framework for Developing IFC-Based 3D Documentation from 2D Bridge Drawings
This article has been corrected.
VIEW CORRECTIONPublication: Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering
Volume 36, Issue 1
Abstract
Building information modeling (BIM) has been widely accepted in the industry and extensively used in supporting many construction tasks. In the government sector, the USDOT Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has implemented building information modeling (BIM) for bridge construction. Hence, state DOTs are now faced with heightened pressure in complying with the FHWA’s Bridge Information Modeling (BrIM) standardization. Although BIM can provide many benefits to DOTs, current BIM-based platforms for bridges are not fully developed to process traditional two-dimensional (2D) bridge drawings for BIM-based computational tasks involving existing bridges, for example cost estimation. Bridges are a critical infrastructure in any nation’s economy, and by law the DOTs are tasked with ensuring that they remain safe for use. To maintain bridges, engineers currently perform periodic inspections, assessing each part of the bridge to identify areas that require maintenance. Maintenance work items are then generated for these areas; these are usually computed traditionally or by systems that still rely heavily on manual inputs. Such processes are time-consuming and cumbersome, and depend on years of bridge technical expertise. To overcome these limitations and improve the accuracy of processes such as generating maintenance work items for bridges, we propose a framework for automatically (1) processing existing 2D bridge drawings for bridges built pre-BIM adoption in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry; (2) converting these record drawings into three-dimensional (3D) information models; and (3) converting 3D information models into industry foundation class (IFC) files. The developed 3D models using the proposed framework were compared against developed 3D models using the state-of-the-art method. Experimental results show that the developed framework can be used in developing algorithms that generate 3D models and IFC output files from portable document format (PDF) bridge drawings in a semiautomated fashion. The proposed method uses 3.33% of the time it takes the current state-of-the-art method to generate a 3D model, and the generated models are of comparative quality.
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Data Availability Statement
Some data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request: raster, vector, and tagged data graphics files, and IFC files.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the National Science Foundation (NSF). This material is based on work supported by the NSF under Grant No. 1937115. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. The authors would like to thank the Bridge Design Office of the Indiana Department of Transportation for providing bridge plans.
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Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering
Volume 36 • Issue 1 • January 2022
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 20, 2020
Accepted: May 11, 2021
Published online: Oct 4, 2021
Published in print: Jan 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Mar 4, 2022
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Cited by
- Hang Li, Jiansong Zhang, Information Extraction for Semantic Enrichment of BIM for Bridges, Construction Research Congress 2024, 10.1061/9780784485262.064, (629-638), (2024).
- Hang Li, Fan Yang, Jiansong Zhang, IFC-Based Semantic Segmentation and Semantic Enrichment of BIM for Bridges, Construction Research Congress 2024, 10.1061/9780784485262.061, (597-606), (2024).