A BIM-GIS integration method in support of the assessment and 3D visualisation of flood damage to a building

Flood damage assessment (FDA) provides an effective basis for the flood risk management process to evaluate and treat risks. Current FDA methods, however, are ill-equipped to account for the distinctiveness of buildings in the analysis. This is mainly due to their limited input data that on the one hand requires complete building information (well-represented in building information models BIM) and, on the other hand, the flood information (commonly managed by geographic information systems GIS). While such requirements cannot be satisfied via independent use of BIM or GIS, their integration can potentially be used for this purpose. The current BIM-GIS integration methods, however, are limited or application-specific. Therefore they fall short in satisfying the micro-level FDA information requirements. This paper presents a new data model as a profile of Geography Markup Language (GML) for BIM-GIS integration to support the detailed assessment and 3D visualisation of flood damage to buildings. The model was further evaluated using a case study and found effective for this purpose.