# Interoperability Analyses of BIM Platforms for Construction Management
## 1 Introduction
This is due to the fact that new updates in versions may cause conflicts. To solve these problems, while addressing the exchange operations, it is necessary to describe the term \"interoperability\". The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) defines it as \"the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged\" [8]. For a smooth workflow, \"interoperability\" is vital due to the properties of preventing recreation or reinput of data and facilitating the efficient use of information through workflow collaboration [9]. Focusing on BIM systems, there have been significant attempts to develop standards to set interoperability between such systems to make them compatible with each other. This means that for a model to be compatible with models created by other software tools, it is crucial for all of them to be translatable into a file format so that all the information of the objects can be properly transferred [10]. In general, the issues related to interoperability in BIM projects are mostly solved with a standardized file exchange format, i.e., Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), which was first specified in 1996 by the International Association for Interoperability (IAI) and developed by buildingSMART International [11]. As it is described in the website of buildingSMART, the definition of IFC is \"In general, IFC, or \"Industry Foundation Classes\", is a standardized, digital description of the built environment, including buildings and civil infrastructure. It is an open, international standard (ISO 16739-1:2018) meant to be vendor-neutral, or agnostic, and usable across a wide range of hardware devices, software platforms, and interfaces for many different use cases\" [12]. IFC indicates \"how\" information is to be exchanged. It is one of the public and worldwide accepted standards (ISO/PAS 16739:2005) for the exchange of information in the AEC industry [11]. IFC adopts the ISO-STEP EXPRESS language to describe its models. Objects defined in the IFC data model allow the sharing of \"intelligent\" information included in BIM [10]. As clarified, interoperability and BIM are strictly related to each other, and the research community has been paying much attention to this relationship from several points of view. For instance, the authors in [13] presented the Rosewood experiment, where product data exchange in the design and fabrication of architectural precast facades in a BIM environment was examined. Results showed that the data exchanges between architectural and precast engineering systems were incomplete and inconsistent, confirming the need for BIM exchange standards improvements. Improvements could be applied not only to standards but also to their use. An example can be found in [14], where the authors proposed a data-driven, iterative method that could be used to develop an algorithm to automatically classify each object in an IFC model into predefined categories to avoid misuses of IFC entities during the creation of BIM models. In the field of the construction industry, interoperability analyses were also conducted in the framework of system performance assessments and energy analysis due to the clear involvement of different disciplines. Other authors have proposed an interoperability specification development approach for performance-based design [15], aimed to improve the building design process by developing a method to determine the interoperability of the utilized programs for evaluating a building's energy performance and indoor comfort [16], and described potential challenges and opportunities for using thermal simulation tools to optimize building performance [17]. In this paper, the workflow of the data exchange of multiple thermal analyses for BIM-based applications is presented. More practically, [PERSON] et al. [18] studied the interoperability between a BIM-based architectural model and several performance analysis programs based on the gbXML protocol.