A Modular Reference Architecture for MCP-Servers Enabling Agentic BIM Interaction
For researchers and developers working on LLM-driven BIM interaction, this work provides a reusable, standardized architecture that addresses the current ad-hoc and tool-specific implementations, enabling systematic evaluation and workflow portability.
The paper introduces a modular reference architecture for MCP servers that decouples the MCP interface from specific BIM-APIs, enabling API-agnostic, isolated, and reproducible agentic BIM interactions. A prototype using IfcOpenShell demonstrates feasibility across common modification and generation tasks, showing reliable workflows and reduced coupling.
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.