A BIM-Oriented Model for supporting indoor navigation requirements

Existing indoor navigation approaches such as navigation based on 2D geometries and pre-defined routing remain insufficient for many applications such as emergency response, delivery, utility maintenance and facility management. The insufficiencies caused by existing navigation approaches can be overcome by making use of the advanced semantic and geometric information included in intelligent building models. A key example of such models is Building Information Models (BIMs) which contain detailed geometric and semantic information about buildings. In fact, the BIMs' structure is very complex for facilitating navigation. This paper presents a new BIM Oriented Modeling methodology resulting in the definition of a new BIM based model (BO-IDM) dedicated for facilitating indoor navigation. The paper later describes the transformation of information from a standard BIM (IFC) into the new model (BO-IDM). The innovation aspects of BO-IDM can be summarized as follows: (i) it provides highly detailed semantic information for indoor navigation and (ii) it represents the non-geo-referenced structure and complex geometries of BIMs with ISO 19107 compliant representations. Therefore this model is well suited for indoor navigation. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.