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Building Information Modelling (BIM) has gained significant relevance in civil engineering, particularly in the infrastructure sector. It offers the potential to increase efficiencies, optimize processes, and enhance sustainability throughout infrastructure projects’ life cycles. BIM consolidates information about asset components into a single model, enabling real-time updates, cost reduction, and improved consistency. Digital twins serve as valuable extensions of BIM in infrastructure, playing a crucial role during operation. By capturing real-time data from sensors and IoT devices, digital twins enabls continuous monitoring, proactive maintenance, efficient energy management, and informed decision-making for optimized operational efficiency. Advancements in 3D point cloud technologies, such as 3D laser scanning, have expanded BIM’s application in operation and maintenance. These technologies rapidly capture accurate and detailed three-dimensional information, prompting the exploration of automated alternatives to manual point cloud modeling. This paper demonstrates the application of supervised machine learning, specifically support vector machines, for analyzing and segmenting 3D point clouds, a crucial step in 3D modeling. Various approaches for semantic segmentation are introduced, investigated, and evaluated using diverse data sets. The results highlight the effectiveness of supervised machine learning techniques in achieving accurate segmentation of 3D point clouds.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) plays a key role in digital design and construction and promises also great potential for facility management. In practice, however, for existing buildings there are often either no digital models or existing planning data is not up-to-date enough for use as as-is models in operation. While reality-capturing methods like laser scanning have become more affordable and fast in recent years, the digital reconstruction of existing buildings from 3D point cloud data is still characterized by much manual work, thus giving partially or fully automated reconstruction methods a key role. This article presents a combination of methods that subdivide point clouds into separate building storeys and rooms, while additionally generating a BIM representation of the building’s wall geometries for use in CAFM applications. The implemented storeys-wise segmentation relies on planar cuts, with candidate planes estimated from a voxelized point cloud representation before refining them using the underlying point data. Similarly, the presented room segmentation uses morphological operators on the voxelized point cloud to extract room boundaries. Unlike the aforementioned spatial segmentation methods, the presented parametric reconstruction step estimates volumetric walls. Reconstructed objects and spatial relations are modelled BIM-ready as IFC in one final step. The presented methods use voxel grids to provide relatively high speed and refine their results by using the original point cloud data for increased accuracy. Robustness has proven to be rather high, with occlusions, noise and point density variations being well-tolerated, meaning that each method can be applied to data acquired with a variety of capturing methods. All approaches work on unordered point clouds, with no additional data being required. In combination, these methods comprise a complete workflow with each singular component suitable for use in numerous scenarios.

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