Data Interoperability of BIM models

Building Information Model (BIM) have been introduced in the A/E/C sectors with the main purpose of implementing a unique data model, which can solve the traditional fragmentation issue affecting the building design and construction knowledge. As any model, BIM is limited by the specific choices that led to its design. The original proposition of BIM solving the fundamental epistemic issues characterising human knowledge, appears rather narve to the current reflection of the knowledge modelling community. Standardisation as a mean of flattening semantic layers, granting for machine interoperability is indeed a fruitful operational perspective. But anchoring the extremely complex operationality of the building design and construction sector to a, presumably objective, representation of the domain objects appears to be an oversimplification of an extremely complex knowledge representation issue. The nature of the technical objects, their aggregations, their arrangements into functional complexes change per objectives of each different design and construction phase. Failure of BIM in supporting the overall building process, without imposing a poor, unique and frustrating conceptualization, is likely to materialize in the current practice. To avoid this deplorable event, an in depth rethinking of the interoperability issue from a process oriented perspective is necessary. The aim of this research is the analysis of the interoperability of Building Information Models in terms of data compliancy. The study concerns the development of an autonomous system for fire regulations control, and its application to a building information model of a school building, originally developed to assess the building's energy efficiency. Hence, the investigation involves the data compliancy in the development of computational geometry algorithms in a BIM environment, implemented for a completely different domain. The model has been developed in Autodesk Revit, and the algorithms have been developed in Python and integrated in the Revit Dynamo environment.