An IFC explorer in the browser, written hastily in 6 hours for Centre for Digital Built Britian Hackathon in March 2022: Can Data Save the World? Climate Data Connectivity, devpost entry
The construction industry has a huge opportunity to contribute to environmental goals of sustainable development by increasing levels of recycling, saving energy used to transport and dispose of waste, manufacturing virgin materials, etc. However the open challenge in the construction industry is to find innovative ways to utilize the information available in an efficient and effective way. We aspire to work on this challenge and build tools and techniques that can help industry and government to reach the net-zero targets.
We are working on building an IFC explorer which aims to extract relevant information from a 3D model which can then be fed to a life cycle analysis (LCA) dashboard. Our product can be used to generate detailed building passports, keeping a track of building updates and repairs without losing the original information (like version control)
We mainly used Python and React. The overall idea is to read a BIM file and extract the relevant information from the metadata. This information will then be analyzed for generating a building material passport and for life cycle analysis.
There are not enough publicly available datasets when it comes to the construction industry. What we would like to see in the future is different stakeholders actively contributing to the central theme of sustainability and resilience by contributing their domain knowledge, making data publicly available and easily assessable.
In the limited time that we had for the hackathon, we came up with an innovative solution for analyzing IFC files, laying the ground work to serve as inputs to a LCA. The end product is a visualization platform to analyze the life cycle analysis of different materials used in the building by extracting the relevant information from a BIM file. This platform can be extended in the automatic generation of material passports, issuing performance certificates, and also tracking the changes (repairs/updates) in the buildings.
We learned the challenges that the construction industry and built environment people, in general, are currently facing. It was interesting to hear and discuss different viewpoints on data sharing and making the data public assess.
We talk to a lot of people from different backgrounds who are experts in their respective fields. They have some brilliant ideas when it comes to solving some specific problem. However, what we think is currently missing is an interdisciplinary problem-solving approach.
James Walsh (walsh.dev)
Haritha Jayasinghe (cam.ac.uk)
Shagun Garg
MIT License