Austroads has published a report comparing the Austroads Data Standard with buildingSMARTS’s IFC4, and Uniclass 2015, all of which are works in progress.
The report is a study of certain aspects of Austroads Data Standard for Road Management and Investment in Australia and New Zealand: Draft 2 Version 2 (due to be published in the first half of 2018).
The study found that the structure and content of the Data Standard can be improved to better serve road networks through the asset lifecycle, and to align with data standards for rail, water and other transport networks.
The Data Specifications Inventory of 32 object classes within Austroads’ draft standard has been mapped as far as possible to buildingSMART’s IFC4 Add2 and to the UK Government’s Uniclass 2015.
This reveals gaps and inconsistencies in all three documents, which need to be addressed as roads infrastructure asset management, across the asset lifecycle, moves towards adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM).
The developers of buildingSMART have started work on ‘open’ modelling requirements for road and rail networks, and for their components (e.g. bridges) but it will be years before this is published and implemented by software vendors such as Autodesk.
Uniclass 2015 is intended to be a single dynamic classification system for BIM projects, serving all sectors and disciplines equally, and the complete asset lifecycle. It already contains many infrastructure objects, and more are being added regularly.
However it does not yet include a properties table.
It is expected that all three initiatives will converge over the next few years, fully enabling the modelling of transport (and other) infrastructure, as well as of buildings and landscapes.
The developers of each should plan for this convergence.
The report recommends that Austroads revises its Data Standard, and contributes to the development of IFC Infrastructure (which is developing more physical objects in the realm of infrastructure), and of Uniclass 2015.
