Some advice for migrating to IFC

Nowadays, the BIM (Building Information Modeling) paradigm is a central topic in the CAAD community. Next to the commercial solutions, the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) have emerged as the best open standard candidate for BIM interoperability. Despite the efforts of the community for promoting IFC over the last 15 years, it seems that its practical adoption in real-life projects has been very limited. The goal of this article is to explore how useful IFC can be today and to provide the reader with some advice for an effective adoption of IFC. Over the last year, we have conducted a project aiming at acquiring a sound understanding of IFC. It was made of two complementary investigations. On one hand, we have focused on the commercial modeling tools and the IFC support they were offering. On the other hand, we have focused on the IFC-based software developments. We have developed a tool converting IFC files into a dedicated thermal assessment based model. We will summarize the experience we have acquired in this project into some advice for users migrating to IFC. Our goal is to confront the practical aspects of the IFC developments, with both the theoretical ambitions and the commercial support currently available.