Аннотация:This paper presents an innovative software platform IFChub intended to build advanced collaborative environments and to conduct multidisciplinary projects in architecture, engineering, construction and facility management. The platform enables IFC models to be shared concurrently among project stakeholders under different collaboration modes corresponding to both pessimistic and optimistic transaction models. As opposed to existing BIM servers, the IFChub platform provides unique features. These are strong compliance with the IFC standard, solid guarantees for ACID and BASE transactional principles, high performance on large-scaled models, advanced capabilities to work through API and standard file sharing.
A partial attention in the paper is paid to issues of managing and versioning IFC models under semantic consistency requirements. These imply compliance of an IFC model or its revisions with the consistency and integrity rules regulated by STEP and IFC standards. Model revision tree is presented as an underlying transaction history structure with complementary representations of entire revisions and partial deltas between nearest revisions. Deltas are used not only to represent changes, but also to keep transaction logs as well as to commit transactions by third-party applications. Delta calculus is applied to formalize the operations of revision comparison, merge, and recovery as well as to sure the semantic consistency of all the model revisions when committing transactions or checking-in IFC files.