BIM Interoperability and Data Exchange Support for As-Built Facility Management

Nowadays, the increasing complexity of buildings highlights the need for the architecture, engineering, construction, and operation (AECO) sector to manage a large amount of data. In this scenario, the building digitisation process offers the opportunity to create virtual databases to collect data from different disciplines efficiently. At this point, Building Information Modelling represents the innovative methodology able to manage a building in its entire life cycle. Its application has been studied and documented in the design phase to construction, but it is important to underline its relevance in the Facility Management (FM) sector. While the literature highlights the many potentials, it also draws attention to the criticalities of using BIM for FM, such as inconsistent and organic asset data acquisition guidelines, inadequate knowledge integration due to different schemas, syntaxes and semantics, and lack of systematic cataloguing of different sources. The contribution of this study is the identification of a generic set of information requirements for FM systems, which should be included in BIM As-Built models for efficient facility operations and maintenance using an open standard format such as Construction-Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie). To this aim, the process is structured in three steps starting with Data Acquisition with digital survey techniques to obtain a 3D point cloud. Then, Data Integration in a Revit platform, and finally, defining what information from the BIM model could be useful, Data Management to transfer the identified specific information requirements into FM systems.