BIM in facilities management applications: A case study of a large university complexPurpose: Building Information Modelling (BIM) in Facilities Management (FM) applications is an emerging area of research based on the theoretical proposition that BIM information, generated and captured during the lifecycle of a facility, can improve building operation. Using this proposition as a starting point, this research aims to investigate the value of BIM and the challenges affecting its adoption in FM applications.Design/methodology/approach: Two inter-related research methods are utilised. The literature is utilised to identify the application areas, value and challenges of BIM in FM. Due to the lack of case studies identified in the literature review, and to provide empirical evidence of the value and challenges of BIM in FM, a case study of Northumbria University's city campus, is used to empirically explore the value and challenges of BIM in FM. Findings:The results demonstrated that the value of BIM in FM stems from improvement to current manual processes of information handover; improvement to the accuracy of FM data, improvement to the accessibility of FM data and efficiency increase in work order execution. The main challenges were the lack of methodologies that demonstrate the tangible benefits of BIM in FM, the limited knowledge of implementation requirement including BIM for FM modelling requirements, the interoperability between BIM and FM technologies, the presence of disparate operational systems managing the same building and finally, the shortage of BIM skills in the FM industry.Originality/value: There is lack of real-life cases on BIM in FM especially for existing assets, despite new constructions representing only 1-2 % of the total building stock in a typical year. The originality of this paper stems from both adding a real life case study of BIM in FM in existing estate and providing empirical evidence of both the value and challenges of BIM in FM applications.

SummaryThe Xbim.Essentials library offers data extraction, data transformation and data validation functions for Building Information Models (BIM); its robust and optimised implementation allows efficient operations on gigabyte-range files for researchers and practitioners interested in the built environment.The library implements the complete object model of BuildingSMART's IFC schemas (2017) along with APIs for their management under the terms of the CDDL (Sun Microsystems 2005), which makes it also suitable for commercial research and development projects.Relevant fields of research span from social sciences to construction engineering and applied mathematics on account of the breadth of domains covered in the over 800 classes of the schema across building lifecycles.The project implements public APIs for:• Federating, merging and splitting models and entities within models (non-trivial because of cyclic and bi-directional relationships defined in the schemas).• Verification of data quality through EXPRESS WHERE clauses and metadata constraints.• programmatic management of IFC properties and relations through Schema Metadata.• Single point management of any IFC file, including XML, STEP21 and IFCZIP formats.Architectural features of the solution include:• Full access to the models through C# interfaces, allowing schema-agnostic data logic on any supported version.• Disk-based and in-memory options to suit diverse workflow infrastructures.• Log management for notification events where exceptions are not appropriate.Additionally, the Xbim.IO.TableStore namespace supports similar APIs, when conceptually suitable, on BuildingSMART's COBie object model (buildingSMART 2013), extending the domain of relevance to construction operations and facility management.Where appropriate, classes in the codebase are generated programmatically from the formal EXPRESS specification files (ISO 2013) ensuring full compliance with the standards. The library has been developed over many years and has supported several research projects such as iCAT

The application of Building Information Modelling (BIM) has demonstrated enormous potential to deliver consistency in the construction collaboration process. BIM can define an explicit configuration for digitized information exchange, however the technology to collaborate on models has not yet delivered the industry requirements for BIM collaboration. This research project is intended to provide a fresh review of industry requirements for BIM collaboration and will analyse how these requirements can be supported using a model server as a collaboration platform. This paper presents a review of existing collaboration platforms, with a particular focus to evaluate the research and development efforts on model servers as a collaboration platform. This paper also reports on the findings of three focus group sessions with industry practitioners to identify any problems in the available collaboration systems. The focus group findings identify a number of issues in current collaboration environments which help to understand the main domains of user requirements for BIM collaboration. These requirement domains will be further analysed to identify functional and technical specifications for a model server enabled collaboration platform.

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