Towards unsupervised BIM product retrieval: a Weisfeiler-Lehman kernel enhanced approach

doi:10.11996/JG.j.2095-302X.2025051123

Abstract

Abstract:

To meet the urgent need for building elements retrieval in the construction industry, an unsupervised building information modeling (BIM) product retrieval method tailored to the characteristics of industry foundation classes (IFC) data was proposed. The method fully exploited the semantic and geometric information from the IFC standard to construct a product attributed graph (PAG) as the product feature. By leveraging the multi-attribute channels of PAG, a PAG isomorphism prediction approach, enhanced by the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) kernel, was proposed to achieve BIM product retrieval. The proposed method accepted two IFC documents as input: Document A, representing the target product to be retrieved, and Document B, serving as the product library. Our method ultimately returned products from Document B similar to the target product in Document A. The principal contributions were threefold: ①The proposal of a BIM product retrieval framework that circumvented the need for data preprocessing while maintaining semantic integrity. ②The development of PAG feature extraction for BIM product and enhanced PAG isomorphism prediction method with augmented WL graph kernels. ③The design of an unsupervised convergence assessment strategy in which the convergence status was timely determined by analyzing the attribute differences between the attributes from source and those predicted. Empirical findings indicated that the PAG isomorphism testing of our methodology achieved convergence within a maximum of three iterations. Under the experimental conditions, the isomorphism testing of BIM products required no longer than 1 second, with an average accuracy rate of 95% in products retrieval.

Key words: building product, Weisfeiler-Lehman kernel, retrieval, unsupervised, graph isomorphism

CLC Number:

TP391.3
TU17

HU Huiqiang, HE Changyan, LIU Xiaojun, JIA Jinyuan, GAO Lu. Towards unsupervised BIM product retrieval: a Weisfeiler-Lehman kernel enhanced approach[J]. Journal of Graphics, 2025, 46(5): 1123-1133.

Figures/Tables 14

Fig. 1 An example for BIM product and its referenced components in IFC document

Fig. 2 An iterator process of 1-WL

Fig. 3 An example of PAG

Fig. 4 The compress operation of PAG attributes

Fig. 5 An iterator of our WL kernel enhanced algorithm (from a single PAG’s view)

Fig. 6 A typical case demonstrating the superiority of our method over others within the same series[27]

Table 1 Experimental data parameters

构件类型	P1	P2	P3	P4	P5	P6	总计
IfcBuildingElementProxy	2	1			9	208	220
IfcDoor	10			11		102
IfcEnergyConversionDevice	137						137
IfcFlowFitting	2						2
IfcFlowTerminal	68	3		37		57	165
IfcFurnishingElement		27		79	7	434	684
IfcRailing	22	7		35		221	287
IfcStair		3					3
IfcStairFlight				20			20
IfcTransportElement		2					2
IfcWindow						53	53
总计	241	43	39	182	16	1 175	1 696

Fig. 7 The visualization of sample data (rac_advanced_sample_project)

Fig. 8 PAG nodes distribution within our dataset

Fig. 9 Comparison analysis of iteration counts

Fig. 10 Comparison analysis of time consumption

Fig. 11 Comparison analysis of retrieval accuracy of BIM products

Fig. 12 BIM products with identical topology but distinct PAG attributes

Fig. 13 The distances distribution of components from three types of instances ((a) IfcBuildingElementProxy; (b) IfcFurnishingElement; (c) IfcRailing)

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