This paper introduces the concept of a BIM-based life-cycle management system for reinforced concrete buildings. The system allows one to compute a prognosis of the building’s condition taking into account the material properties of individual components, the environmental load as well as measurement data from current inspections. This prognosis then forms foundations for scheduled maintenance and repair actions in an economically efficient way. A particularly important feature of the presented system is that all input data as well as the computational results are associated with a (full) 3D Building Information Model (BIM) of the construction. In this way, an easy localization of the information is achieved facilitating both the data collection and the estimation of the building condition for engineers involved in inspection planning, inspection or the scheduling of repair actions. To further facilitate data input and interpretation, a hierarchic level-of-detail approach is employed for structuring the building model, ranging from building level down to individual hot spots. Additionally, the integration of a meta-model allows the flexible adaption of the semantic data model to specific buildings types or the particular needs of the users.

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This paper introduces a software tool for the predictive life-cycle management of reinforced concrete bridges. The novel aspect of this particular tool is the integration of non-destructive inspection techniques in combination with fully-probabilistic deterioration models. The use of these models requires that the building under examination be subdivided into multiple levels of detail. We employ a 3D model of the building for creating and visualizing the different system levels. At the same time the 3D model forms the basis of any data acquisition, analysis and evaluation. The system is implemented by coupling a Java 3D front-end with a relational database, in which the construction geometry and all related information is stored. Due to the long life span of bridge structures, the software is required to satisfy special requirements in terms of its flexibility. It is shown how new materials, inspection techniques, deterioration models, repair procedures etc. can easily be integrated into the software tool.

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