Ontology-based modeling for construction site planning: Towards an ifcOWL semantic enrichment

Nowadays, there is an increasing recognition of the value of effective information and knowledge management (KM) in the construction projects. Infact, Knowledge-based Process modelling is used in construction to support various simulation tasks. In this field, ontology-based semantic modelling is seen as an important means of addressing this problem to construct robust knowledge-based systems. In parallel, the advancement of information technology in the AEC industry makes available in a construction project a richness of design information offered by Building Information Modelling (BIM) IFC-based. The development of an ontological version of the IFC schema has been largely promoted and now the ifcOWL Ontology is available in the sector. But, in the construction scheduling task, BIM has progressively shown limits in terms of semantic representation and efficiency of supporting scheduling processes and for this reason this study, which is a part of a wider research project, aims to organize and formally represent by using ontologies the construction scheduling knowledge in order to define a complete Knowledge-Base (KB) able to allow the development of computer applications and automated reasoning mechanisms for construction scheduling. It consists of four sub-ontologies, including Construction Scheduling Ontology, Construction Workspaces Ontology, Construction Time Ontology and Building Ontology. In this paper the Construction Scheduling Ontology is extensively presented in terms of classes, relationships and axioms. Such an ontology has been converted in a script in OWL language by using Protégé that is an open-source platform to construct domain models and knowledge-based applications with ontologies. The developed construction scheduling ontology represents an ifcOWL semantic enrichment which is the first step towards automated knowledge-based scheduling systems integrated with BIM.