Roadmap to Intelligent Product Model (IFC) 

Type of the project: Research
Status 10/2002: Ongoing  

Organization:

VTT:   http://www.vtt.fi/

Contact person:

Tapio Koivu:   tapio.koivu@vtt.fi 

Project summary:

At the moment the business processes of the facilities management and construction industry seem to be in a state of flux. The industry is facing more heterogeneous and complex demands and expectations of its customers and different stakeholders. The management of facilities is becoming more professional as an industry and building and construction sector reacts to this by becoming more customer-orientated. 

In order to ensure the evolvement of the IFC model in the future, a foresights of the development of the business processes and its flows of information have to be studied and a set of alternative routes to the future needs to be drafted as a basis for the decision making of the further development of the processes and its information systems. 

The aim of the study is to identify 

• areas where the FM and Construction business processes need re-engineering to gain the full potential of IT in the future 
• possible scenarios of how product modeling technologies will benefit the construction process in the new economy
• steps needed in RTD work needed to achieve the chosen scenario(s) 
• areas that will spur the development of other areas 
• areas that will bring interoperability to the largest number of existing industry software applications 
• schemata that are likely to be implemented in leading industry software 

Achieved results:

Abstract of the ITcon article "Future of Product Modeling and Knowledge Sharing in the FM/AEC Industry":   http://www.itcon.org/2002/9/

ITcon article "Future of Product Modeling and Knowledge Sharing in the FM/AEC Industry" in PDF format:   http://www.itcon.org/2002/9/paper.pdf

Full end report of the project in Finnish:   http://www.inf.vtt.fi/pdf/tiedotteet/2002/T2161.pdf