Generating IFC-compliant models and structural graphs of truss bridges from dense point clouds

Abstract

The IFC schema has been evolving towards the infrastructure domain. Furthermore, the use of laser scanning technologies as means to digitalize and monitor infrastructures has also significantly increased. This work presents an automated modelling approach for truss bridges that utilizes laser scanning data as its source for geometrical information. The methodology takes a partially instance-segmented point cloud of a truss bridge and generates both an IFC-compliant information model of the truss and the corresponding structural graph. This process uses bounding boxes and their collisions to overcome the missing data from the partial segmentation to create the truss model, as well as to identify the nodes that connect the different truss members. The methodology was tested on a use case made of 272 members and obtained the truss model and structural graph files.