Implementation of IFC-based web server for collaborative building design between architects and structural engineers

This paper presents the implementation of an Industry Foundation Class-based (IFC-based) information server for web-enabled collaborative building design between the architect and structural engineer. In this research, the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard is employed to build the framework of a design information server; the web and XML technologies are used to implement the collaboration and information sharing mechanisms in the server. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs) are adopted as the information model of the server to facilitate the interoperability among multidisciplinary AEC software applications. The current implementation of the server system supports the automatic transformation of the design model contents and representations from the architectural domain to the structural domain, and remote visualization and interaction by Java applet and the Java3D technology. An algorithm that is able to deduce the topological relationship among different structural elements has been proposed in this paper. A case study is presented at the end of the paper to illustrate the use of the information server for the architectural and structural design collaboration.