Balfour Beatty Vinci – HS2 Area North BIM team IFC processing

As the main works civil contractor for HS2 Area North, Balfour Beatty Vinci’s (BBV) BIM team plays a critical role in delivering structured, high-quality openBIM data to the employer. A key focus of its work is ensuring all 3D model information is correctly categorised and organised to support efficient data consumption in the operation and maintenance phase.

BBV’s challenge was to deliver several thousand digital infrastructure assets as IFC4.3. These assets were varied, complex and housed in secure environments requiring offline validation and strict data governance. As IFC4.3 was newly released, industry support from common software was still developing. BBV set targets to meet this challenge in-house and leave a positive legacy.

The team’s approach prioritised an autonomous and scalable process to normalise outputs from source applications, implement data standards, evidence compliance against a suite of Information Delivery Specifications (IDS), and comply with buildingSMART validation.

There were numerous key challenges, including learning the IFC schema and IDS definition, correcting non-compliant IFCs from sources, minimising CAD licensing costs and having limited IFC editing capabilities. The team also needed to find a way to process large IFC files, integrate complex CDE systems and improve processing outcomes.

BBV created AI-developed Python scripts to build an automated pipeline, using Microsoft Fabric, to industrialise IFC normalisation and validation.

The process progressed non-compliant IFC2x3 models to fully assured IFC4.3 outputs to meet the appointing party Exchange Information Requirements. BBV developed a custom-built IFC application (Viper) to manually edit any IFC outputs that could not be processed automatically.

Initially, Fabric’s limited memory caused time-outs when processing large IFC files. To overcome this, BVV re-engineered its scripts to process files in segments, clear memory between operations, and complete entity mapping without crashing.

BVV tackled the challenge of reading and modifying IFC and IDS files from Azure Blob Storage. After extensive trial and error, BBV code successfully enabled communication between Fabric and Azure, allowing seamless file handling.

Dashboarding solutions were introduced to improve transparency, script execution times, success and failure rates, and overall workflow health.

Outcomes have been transformative. Validation and classification tasks now take minutes instead of hours. Offline validation and cryptographic access control ensure full compliance with data protection policies. Reliance on expensive commercial tools and supply chain resource requirements has been eliminated. Data quality has improved through early detection of non-compliant files, as well as sustainability through reduced cloud dependency. Dashboarding has improved monitoring and accountability.

[This case study is reproduced with kind permission of the Digital Construction Awards, and is for a 2026 finalist shortlisted for Digital Team of the Year – a category sponsored by nima.Read all the shortlisted profiles on Digital Construction Plus. The winner will be revealed at the Awards dinner on 18 March at the London Marriott Grosvenor Square.]