A Study On The Implementation Of BIM Ontology On Bridge Cracks

As one of the most common damages on the concrete elements of bridges,cracks are always the major research field of civil engineering section.Collecting,analysis the types,causes and other vital characteristics are the main goals of crack analysis.However,crack inspection always generates large amount and various kinds of data.How to manage and analyse the data effectively and generate reliable conclusions of inspections is the problem that need to be solved.And the powerful capability of BIM information management gives us a way to solve this problem.The author firstly did a literature review to select the characteristics that may cause the cracking on the concrete elements of bridges as well as the parameters of cracks that need to be monitored regularly.Then the author summarised the information like the type,location,reason,etc.of cracks that may appear on the concrete elements and the parameters of cracks that may influence the performance of the structures,the author grouped those characteristics and parameters precisely and documented them into the Crack Analysis Ontology.To build the Crack Analysis Ontology,the first task is to define the classes that include those elements,cracks,hazard,etc.Then defining proper object properties that describe the relationships between classes is needed.After that,the author defined the data properties based on the selected characteristics to describe individuals.For the convenience of information querying,checking and reasoning,the author programmed some rules using SWRL so that the rules can help searching the data and information from enormous knowledge base and do further reasoning properly based on the knowledge in the ontology.When the Crack Analysis Ontology had been built,the author conducted an experiment to show the whole workflow of efficient management system of information about cracks on concrete elements,including information and data acquiring,using Crack Analysis Ontology to manage the knowledge related to cracks and elements and using SWRL rules to do further reasoning according to the knowledge base.This thesis firstly implemented ontology to managing knowledge of cracks on bridge concrete elements.with building an efficient system of ontology,the processing efficiency and rate of re-usage of crack-related data and information had been significantly improved,which can dramatically decrease repeated work.Furthermore,using SWRL rules can do the reasoning using the knowledge stored in the ontology so that the potential appearance of some cracks can be predicted,and some solutions can be suggested to the existing cracks.This research is a primary attempt of digitalization in the section of civil engineering,especially in the field of knowledge management.And it makes the basis for the comprehensive digitalization and automation based on the development of big data and cloud technology in the whole industry.