Leveraging integration facades for model-based tool interoperability

Data exchange and management methods are of paramount importance in areas as complex as the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industries and Facility Management. For example, Big Open BIM requires seamless information flow among an arbitrary number of applications. The backbone of such information flow is a robust integration, whose tasks include overcoming technological as well as semantic and pragmatic gaps and conflicts both within and between data models. In this work, we introduce a method for integrating the pragmatics at design-time and the semantics of independent applications at run-time into so-called “integration facades”. We utilize Model-driven Engineering for the automatic discovery of functionalities and data models, and for finding a user-guided consensus. We present a case study involving the domains of architecture, building physics and structural engineering for evaluating our approach in object-oriented as well as data-oriented programming environments. The results produce, for each scenario, a single integration facade that acts as a single source of truth in the data exchange process.