A Modular Reference Architecture for MCP-Servers Enabling Agentic BIM Interaction

TL;DR

This paper presents a modular, API-agnostic architecture for MCP servers to facilitate reusable, reliable agentic BIM workflows driven by LLMs, addressing current ad hoc implementations.

Contribution

It introduces a microservice-based reference architecture with explicit adapter contracts, enabling standardized, portable BIM interactions via MCP.

Findings

Prototype implementation with IfcOpenShell demonstrates feasibility.

Architecture enables reliable workflows and reduces coupling.

Provides a reusable foundation for systematic BIM research.

Abstract

Agentic workflows driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to Building Information Modelling (BIM), enabling natural-language retrieval, modification and generation of IFC models. Recent work has begun adopting the emerging Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a uniform tool-calling interface for LLMs, simplifying the agent side of BIM interaction. While MCP standardises how LLMs invoke tools, current BIM-side implementations are still authoring tool-specific and ad hoc, limiting reuse, evaluation, and workflow portability across environments. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a modular reference architecture for MCP servers that enables API-agnostic, isolated and reproducible agentic BIM interactions. From a systematic analysis of recurring capabilities in recent literature, we derive a core set of requirements. These inform a microservice architecture centred on an explicit adapter contract that decouples the MCP interface from specific BIM-APIs. A prototype implementation using IfcOpenShell demonstrates feasibility across common modification and generation tasks. Evaluation across representative scenarios shows that the architecture enables reliable workflows, reduces coupling, and provides a reusable foundation for systematic research.