A flexible model for incorporating construction product data into building information models When considering the integration and interoperability between AEC FM software applications and construction products data it is essential to investigate the state of the art and conduct an extensive review in the literature of both Building Information Models and electronic product catalogues. It was found that there are many reasons and key barriers that hinder the developed solutions from being implemented. Among the reasons that are attributed to the failure of many previous research projects to achieve this integration aim are the proprietary developments of CAD vendors the fragmented nature of construction product data i.e. commercial and technical data the prefabrication versus on site production marketing strategies and brand naming the referencing of a product to the data of its constituents availability of life cycle data in a single point in time where it is needed all over the whole life cycle of the product itself taxonomy problems the inability to extract search parameters from the building information model to participate in the conduction of parametric searches. Finally and most important is keeping the product data in the building information model consistent and up to date. Hence it was found that there is a great potential for construction product data to be integrated to building information models by electronic means in a dynamic and extensible manner that prevents the model from getting obsolete. The study has managed to establish a solution concept that links continually updated and extensible life cycle product data to a software independent building information model (IFC) all over the life span of the product itself. As a result the solution concept has managed to reach a reliable building information model that is capable of overcoming the majority of the above mentioned barriers. In the meantime the solution is capable of referencing retrieving updating and merging product data at any point in time. A distributed network application that represents all the involved parties in the construction product value chain is simulated by real software tools to demonstrate the proof of concept of this research work.