Abstract
Construction industries have increasingly utilized Building information Modeling (BIM) technologies. Interoperability - the capability for BIM data to run from one computer application to another in the life cycle of a project - has become one of the principal research areas. Enhancing interoperability inevitably requires information structures that are standardized throughout the construction industries. As a candidate of the data exchange standard, Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) has been developed and several researches recently performed to measure its richness of digital data exchange. But doubts have been brought up whether IFC meets a sufficient level of interoperability since the research result revealed a number of cases of information misrepresentation and loss. This research presents the lessons learned from the interoperability tests of three widely used 3D design applications including Graphisoft's Archicad, Autodesk's Revit, and Bentley's Bentley Architecture. One building's architectural and structural design data were modeled with the three tools and exchanged through IFC respectively for interoperability test.