BIM in fire protection planning: attributes and classes relevant to practice

Building Information Modeling (BIM) and the open data exchange format Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) are to be used for the approval process in the future. The fire protection certificate as part of the application for construction permit is not yet integrated into BIM. In addition to insufficient communication and the late involvement of the specialist domain the reasons include the lack of standardization and the associated lack of digitization of fire protection planning processes and information in the BIM methodology. To integrate the specialist domain into the BIM process there must be a digital specialist model that captures all the necessary information. This information must be standardized and structured in the IFC interface in order to ensure subsequent exchange. This article shows the necessity and the possibilities of integrating fire protection planning into the building information model. It summarizes the advantages and challenges of standardization and presents a newly developed property set for the classification of building products and types of construction with regard to their fire behavior, which can be used for evaluation and testing in the future.