The numerous construction projects in China provide the best environment for the development of information technology applied in building design. Various commercial CAD/CAE software applications are purchased by design firms for multi-disciplinary design tasks. However, researches on integration and interoperability are seldom considered. This study pursues a breakthrough point of integration in the architectural and structural domains and expects further development in other aspects. A central building information modeling (BIM) framework based on the industry foundation classes (IFC) is proposed to handle the data exchange between IFC-compatible architectural models and structural models. A central XML(extensible markup language)-based unified finite element model (FEM) is proposed for model conversion among various commercial structural CAE software applications. In addition to bidirectional data interfaces among IFC-based BIM, XML-based FEM and various commercial FEMs, some other components such as visualization, calculation and model editing/check are also equipped into the prototype system. © 2011 Shanghai Jiaotong University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.