Using IFC models for asset management
I work in the US transportation sector for a State Department of Transportation. We are trying to wrap our heads around BIM/IFC and all the great stuff that's related. I have a question. IFC models for project development, contracting, construction, eventually end up as As-Built models. A project may cover a mile or two of roadway. Our transportation network has 1000s of miles with millions of individual assets that must be managed. We do many projects a year (don't have a count but let's say 500+ of varying sizes and complexity).
When it comes to using the IFC models for asset management and operations, what do people do to keep all the information organized? How can you do a system-wide query across your entire agency's asset inventory when everything is in project-based models?
I supposed a corollary would be a someone who owns multiple buildings, with a model for each building, that wants to get information about all their buildings across their entire asset portfolio.
What software tools do people use for this?
Comments
Hi @Rick_Brice ,
You might want to check on https://pooledfund.org/Details/Study/624, and https://bimclearinghouse.com/ as I understand there is a "BIM for Infrastructure is a collaborative work method for structuring, managing, and using an agency’s enterprise-wide data and information for transportation assets throughout their life cycles. BIM is about “liberating” data from siloed systems and making it available in an automated way to anyone who needs it when they need it. This website - developed under Transportation Pooled Fund Study TPF-5(480) - provides technical guidance for leveraging the concepts of BIM and open data standards, and guidelines for information management across all phases of the built environment., I think there might be more info on the subject from the state authorities themselves.
@Dimitris thank you for the reply. I'm involved with that project. This question has come up several times and we don't have a good answer.
This same question has come up for a sign lifecycle management project I'm involved with. The only solution we've found is https://github.com/IfcSharp/IfcSQL. It doesn't look all that promising since no one is really working on the project (commits are over a year old).
I was hoping to gain some insights from other that have to manage large numbers of geographically dispersed assets.
@Rick_Brice You are on the right track with the linked project given that it includes 'SQL' in the title. As you have noted, file-based project data will not scale to agency-wide management. You will definitely need a database of some sort. Given that a lot of the queries are likely to be spatial in nature (say within a closed boundary or within a buffer distance of a linear reference path) you have a solution that is starting to look a lot like enterprise GIS. My hunch is that this will ultimately end up as a hybrid of some sort where assets like signs and bridges are primarily represented by point geometry, with an option to drill in to the BIM data as necessary.
@civilx64
100% agree
where I work projects span tens of kilometers of raitracks and ancillary infrastructure. GIS helps keep things together, remarkably well (Mapping, analysis, quantities).
"GeoPackage is, by design, a SQLite container extended for geographic information storage and exchange."
When zooming on a single infrastructure, or building, IFC takes over, we started roughly a year ago for quantities and so far so good
Hey, I'm not sure this is completely relevant, but since your question hits closer to home than I usually see, I'll provide my 2 cents. I work as a mechanical design engineer for the University of Georgia. My coworker and I have been working on getting any sort of robust asset management worked out for the university (~460 buildings, many hundreds of thousands of assets across the state) and boy does it feel like the wild west. I can tell you that we are doing well in the entire state of Georgia, and we literally are just getting to collecting .csv files of assets (better than handwritten reports by in-house shop personnel of what they can visibly see after project is complete).
Pete Strazdas has been a major inspiration because he's the only one I've seen that works in public type field (he's retired from Western Michigan University) that understands the hurdles to actually getting asset data that's useful for the O&M folks. Often times, I work with O&M guys that really don't have any familiarity with a computer. We've found that starting really simple (excel charts) on a project can be palatable for the contractors/engineers that will be physically inputting the data.
I really do think that open BIM is the future, but I have yet to work with an engineer or contractor that can show me a workflow for their project for our institution.
I'm not too skilled with GIS, but my understanding is that it a database would have a record of a bridge, the bridge is geospatially located, and the bridge record would contain a link to its IFC model - or something similar.
That seems like a very reasonable way to keep track of assets.
Does this support querying information across all of an owner's assets of the same type? Let's say after 15 years of service some bridge bearings from a particular manufacture are prematurely failing. I want to query across all my IFC models for the as-built condition to find out which bridges have bearings by that manufacture and the age of the bearings.
Yes - you can think of GIS as a relational database where one of the fields is geometry - typically point, line, polyline, polygon. Some systems support 3D meshes also. So bridge assets would have a spatial location - likely as a (lat, long) point - and additional fields like NBI ID to join to other data sources. IFC PropertySets fit the relational DB table structure nicely - especially if you think of a PropertySet template as the schema definition.
Your use case with the bearings is spot on and exactly the type of analysis that is commonly run by GIS analysts.
That’s a very relevant question, especially for agencies managing large-scale infrastructure like state DOTs. When it comes to using IFC models for asset management across an entire network, the key is transitioning from project-based data silos to a centralized, federated data environment.
Many organizations use Common Data Environments (CDEs) like Autodesk Construction Cloud, Bentley iTwin, or Trimble Quadri to aggregate and manage model data. For system-wide asset querying, consistent asset classification and metadata standards (like ISO 19650 or COBie) are crucial, enabling tools like ESRI ArcGIS, IBM Maximo, or AgileAssets to connect with and consume structured IFC data.
This allows agencies to link individual project models to a larger asset database or digital twin framework. In essence, the models don’t just stay project-specific—they’re indexed, tagged, and integrated into platforms that support portfolio-wide visibility. Some DOTs are also leveraging BIM-GIS integration for geospatial insights and long-term facility management.