Extension of IFC schema in construction delay claims

Abstract EN

Despite the widespread implementation of Building Information Modelling (BIM) in Construction and Facilities Management, limited researches are conducted on forensic delay claims.

As witnessed from several construction disputes and court cases, forensic delay claims are known to be the most complex types of claims, in which Claimants incur significant losses due to their failure to substantiate.

Despite the availability of modern document control system, forensic delay claims require extensive research to assimilate event related contemporaneous project records within a limited time.

This paper addresses the research gap of the application of BIM technology in the assessment of forensic claims.

It proposes a new mechanism of extending the non-proprietary Industry Foundation (IFC) Schema by dynamic property sets to integrate BIM objects with claim related attributes such as delay events and float paths and their respective project documents.

The proposed methodology enhances the overall efficiency of the forensic claim process enabling the retrieval of all spatial related project documents pertaining to a specified delay event.

This allows the performance of what-if scenarios for the optimum selection and substantiation of a delay claim