Mechanisms in IFC to store measured real-life values

Certain parts of a building can and sometimes must be described using standardized parameters that describe the product quality in a measurable manner such as concrete quality ratings. However in terms of BIM I would like to see the possibility to actually document what has been measured on site (e.g. concrete slump test). It is basically a more detailed way of storing the model “as built”.

Is IFC already capable of storing such real-life values of measured parameters which are obviously not available at design time?

Hi @RBorowan. Technically, yes. But in the schema it is not defined or used consistently. In the IfcBuildingControlsDomain, mainly for MEP objects, there are a number of Property Sets with the suffix, “…PHistory” (PerformanceHistory). I’ve always assumed that they were fields for such usage. However, they are not consistently formatted, nor do they always contain a great deal of detail or measured values of each object. Rationalizing and expanding these could be am interesting bSI-level standardization project, however.

I suppose you could also develop custom property sets to do the same thing, with whatever values were needed.

I think we’d need more insight from the Model Support Group members (such as @TLiebich) or others in the FM domain that may have tried this already.

1 Like

I think IFC schema needs an IfcQuality inside the IfcControl extension (and also IfcQuantity inside the IfcControl extension, instead of IfcQuantitySet inside the IfcPropertyDefinition extension)

Current IFC just supports “traditional Project Management - PM - Iron Triangle

Why are the property sets with the suffix “…PHistory” not present in between the Property Sets for Objects in concept usage of a specific entity? Are they still in use?

(Eg. IfcPump has Pset_PumpOccurence and Pset_PumpTypeCommon as property sets but Pset_PumpPHistory does also exist but isn’t available in the documentation of the entity IfcPump. Is there a specific reason for this?)

I’m asking this because I want to export necessary information from Revit to Ifc in order to convert the information from Ifc to BEM (Modelica).
So I’m looking for a way to store building simulations relevant information for HVAC (like pressure drops, mass flows, etc) in Ifc. Ifc is rather limited in this perspective, but it looks like PHistory could be a possibility if it is still in use? Or is there a better way?