Currently within the realms of transportation infrastructure the infrastructure room is engaged in the domains of road and rail transportation, with its common dependent of bridge engineering, in addition a separate BuildingSMART room has begun for airports, to address the unique place they sit between the buildings and infrastructure domain. These domains address two of the three major modes of transport for people, goods and services utilized in today’s economy.
Sea transportation and maritime structures form a substantial part of the global economy and has been growing consistently over the past 20 years. Total transport capacity has steadily grown from 800 million tons in 2000 to 1200 million tons by 2010. The shipping industry within the UK alone is worth over £4 billion. Considering this identified gap in the coverage of IFC for Infrastructure, this is a proposal to start the international development of IFC for open maritime infrastructure, beginning with its expansion to cover the domain of ports and harbour design, construction and operation.
This project will draw on the expert knowledge from the BuildingSMART international community and leading organizations in ports and harbour construction to provide a framework for open data standardization. This framework will include domain specific IFC schema extension, Model View Definition (MVD) development, software & model demonstration, documentation for the extensions and MVDs plus guidelines on use of the information. The project would align (and if requested assist) its efforts with the outcomes from the overall architecture project and concurrent developments of the common definitions project. As shown in Figure 1 the project would need to draw from and align its efforts with the work of IFC Rail and Road, to achieve full integration.
