Brussels Airport Company (BAC) has formally adopted an open standards policy for Building Information Modelling (BIM), placing the internationally recognised IFC format at the heart of how it manages, exchanges, and archives digital building data.

The newly published BAC BIM Open Standards Policy marks a strategic commitment to vendor independence, long-term data accessibility, and interoperability across the full asset lifecycle — from design and construction through to operation and archiving.

Why IFC?

IFC (Industry Foundation Class) is an ISO-certified open schema that is widely supported across the BIM software landscape and has demonstrated backwards compatibility for over two decades. Unlike proprietary formats, IFC is not tied to any single vendor’s licensing model, pricing decisions, or product roadmap — making it the logical choice for an organisation managing infrastructure at scale.

The policy highlights a growing concern across the industry: the monetisation of APIs and AI-based tooling is introducing unpredictable recurring costs into workflows built on proprietary ecosystems. BAC’s IFC-first approach is designed to insulate the organisation from this exposure

Five pillars of the new policy

Hybrid approach

BAC acknowledges that not every business requirement can currently be met by open formats alone. The policy therefore adopts a hybrid model: native as-built files must be delivered alongside IFC..

IFC is the single source of truth. It is the contractual final deliverable on every project, and the format against which all quality checks are exclusively performed. This creates one consistent, software-neutral assessment pipeline across the entire BAC portfolio.

Native files — in whatever authoring tool the supply chain uses — are also a contractual deliverable, but serve a specific and limited purpose: model maintenance. They are not the reference for quality, nor the basis for exchange. Their role is to ensure that models can be updated and kept current over the asset lifecycle.

To make this work in practice, BAC is aiming on framework agreements with external contractors. Where native formats fall outside what BAC’s own team can maintain — for instance, models authored in tools other than Autodesk Revit or Civil3D — ongoing maintenance is embedded directly into project contracts or standing framework agreements with partners who hold the appropriate licences and expertise. This ensures continuity of the native files without creating a dependency on any one tool internally, and without disrupting the IFC-first pipeline.

Industry position

Beyond operational efficiency, the policy reflects BAC’s broader vision of supporting open industry standards rather than reinforcing single-vendor dominance. In a geopolitical context where digital sovereignty is increasingly important, the decision to anchor data management in an ISO standard represents a deliberate, long-term strategic choice.

Download the policy here: Downloads – buildingSMART