Integrating railway subdomain-specific data standards into a common IFC-based data model

Like in many other domains in the construction industry, concepts and methods of Building Information Modeling (BIM) are becoming more and more important for the design of civil infrastructure assets. Although several data formats have been developed to capture domain-specific data, none of these schemas can be used for holistic communication and cross-domain data exchange. In this paper, we present approaches for mapping existing domain-specific data formats in a more generic schema like the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). This offers the possibility to develop coordination models for seamless data exchange and improved communication between project stakeholders.