Design patterns for BIM-based service-oriented architectures.pdf

Automation in Construction 25 (2012) 59–71
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Automation in Construction
journal homepage: ate/autcon
Design patterns for BIM-based service-oriented architectures
Umit Isikdag ⁎
Beykent University, Department of Software Engineering, Ayazaga, Istanbul, Turkey
article info abstract
Article history: Today Integrated Project Delivery together with Building Information Modeling is being realized as a process
Accepted 18 April 2012 of managing a project over a single shared information backbone. In the near future, Building Information
Available online 17 May 2012 Models (BIMs) will be used as unique resources for enabling seamless data level interoperability, which
will greatly facilitate the processes in the Building Life Cycle. In this context, enabling the collaborative use
Keywords:
of BIMs is ing essential and is much required by the industry for addressing the issues associated
BIM
with the poor efficiencies in Information Systems (IS) and productivity. On the other hand, in the new IS ar-
REST
SOAP chitectures, service and resource orientation are ing widely used, in terms of supporting collaboration
AJAX over distributed environments. This paper introduces three design patterns which will help in facilitating
Integration BIM-based information sharing over the web, and web-based collaborative use of the BIMs. The patterns
Web services were developed to formalize the approaches in interacting with the shared BIMs over the web. The first pat-
tern – BIM AJAX – explains how AJAX techniques can be used for supporting information retrieval from BIMs.
The second pattern – BIM SOAP Façade – provides a standard coarse-grained interface to reach multiple BIMs
over the web. The third pattern – RESTful BIM – elaborates on how BIM-based systems can benefit from the
REST (Resource Oriented) Architectures. The paper starts with providing an overview on Building Informa-
tion Models focusing on the