A rule-based system to automatically validate IFC second-level space boundaries for building energy analysis

To facilitate BIM-to-Building Energy Modeling (BEM) geometric transformation, IFC provides a concept of second-level space boundary (SB). In the current practice, however, quality issues of second-level SBs in IFC models are often found, which makes it critical to evaluate their quality before retrieving them for energy analysis. Each second-level SB is objectified by carrying surface geometry and rich semantic data. Manually checking a large number of second-level SBs thus becomes error-prone and impracticable, while automatic and reliable approaches are still not available. This study presents an automated system to validate IFC second-level SBs with 38 rules in terms of syntactic and semantic correctness, geometric correctness, and consistency. The test results with an IFC model of a real-world building show that the system allows users to reliably evaluate the quality of second–level SBs as well as conveniently locate and visualize detected geometric and non-geometric errors.