Addressing BIM Versioning Challenges: A Blockchain-Ready IFC Schema Extension for Semantic Change Management

A BIM project often encounters many major and minor BIM versions throughout the project’s lifecycle. The main reason is expansive and inevitable changes in the conduction of lengthy, complex, and uncertainty-rich construction project. Recently, a semantic differential transaction (SDT) approach was proposed to minimize the data redundancy in the versions for blockchains, by extracting the semantically essential design changes between open BIM versioning. However, the current IFC schema cannot store, verify, or utilize such changes. This paper presents an IFC schema extension of a blockchain-ready change history for BIM versioning. The proposed extension supports both local storage of the changes and remote blockchain verifications. Firstly, the extended IFC entities define a mapping from the SDT model to the up-to-date IFC schema. Then, the new entities are managed and structured by a Java-based compiler-compiler approach; Meanwhile, the extended BIM files are verifiable using the official IFC verification tools. Finally, a pilot study is conducted to validate the technological feasibility of the proposed IFC schema extension.