Throughout 2018 and 2019, buildingSMART ran a suite of parallel projects to extend the scope of IFC for a variety of infrastructure domains. Following a series of workshops, the Railway Room and the Infrastructure Room established a strong collaboration to undertake harmonization between these projects and as a result, the "IFC Infrastructure Extensions" project was formed.

The IFC Infrastructure Extensions project is a harmonised approached to linear infrastructure assets incorporating Road, Rail, Bridge and Ports and Waterways. These individual projects are operating across different time frames with different milestones. They do however address common concepts with significant overlap. These domain projects address several concepts that are common. Further to these domain focused areas, a further project was established called "Common Schema" to track those separate domain projects and to identify and define common concepts (such as spatial structure, geotechnics and earthworks, utility networks, etc.).  and to ensure a level of harmonisation and consistency in the development of the separate domain extensions. Two of those projects (Road and Ports & Waterways), having completed a “requirements definition” stage, were developing conceptual models and draft schema of their proposed extensions during much of 2019. The Rail project prepared three major reports (Requirement Analysis, Conceptual Model and Data Requirements) as part of the Candidate Standard package delivered ahead of the Beijing Summit (28-31 October 2019). The Common Schema project delivered extension proposals for key areas including geotechnics, earthworks, spatial structure and kinematic envelopes. By the middle of 2019, it was recognised that there was an urgent need to harmonise the work across those domains, taking into consideration the work previously completed ahead of the IFC Bridge Candidate Standard.

There was unanimous agreement across all the infrastructure project domains that our collaborative goal would be to deliver a single harmonised IFC schema extension proposal that incorporated all the proposed extensions (road, rail, ports & waterways and common schema