ABSTRACT
Much effort has been seen in development of product models for building design and construction in order to enable the interoperability among heterogeneous application systems and software packages such as CAD, analysis, conformance checking, cost estimation, construction scheduling, for about a quarter of a century (Eastman 1999). Recently, Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) of International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) seems to be becoming a world standard for building product models. Although about half of the shield tunnel works in the world exist in Japan, most of the detailed design and construction data have been owned and stored by the engineers who worked at the construction sites. Surprisingly, such precious and important data are not necessarily stored in construction companies and, thus, may be lost or may not be available when necessary in the future, which should be prevented by preserving the data in a systematic way. Thus, a product model for shield tunnels has been in the process of development in our research group to represent and preserve all necessary data in design, construction, and maintenance (Yabuki et al. 2007).
