Service-Oriented Approach to Facility Management Using Extended Building Information Modelling

Abstract

Facility management (FM), from a service oriented approach, addresses the functions and requirements of different services such as energy management, space planning and security service. Different service requires different information to meet the needs arising from the service. Object-based Building Information Modeling (BIM) is limited to support FM services; though this technology is able to generate 3D models that semantically represent facility's information dynamically over the lifecycle of a building. This paper presents a semiotics-inspired framework to extend BIM from a service-oriented perspective. The extended BIM, which specifies FM services and required information, will be able to express building service information in the right format for the right purposes. The service oriented approach concerns pragmatic aspect of building's information beyond semantic level. The pragmatics defines and provides context for utilization of building's information. Semiotics theory adopted in this paper is to address pragmatic issues of utilization of BIM for FM services.

The Impact of Building Information Modelling (BIM) in the Construction Industry

“…Because it enables the design team, the construction team, and the building owner or operator to add to and refer back to all of the information they learn throughout the course of their contribution to the BIM model, Building Information Modeling (BIM) helps bridge the information loss that is associated with handling a project from one group to the next (Tian & Liu, 2014). As a consequence of this, the manager of the facility could have certain favorable outcomes.…”

BIM Guidelines Inform Facilities Management Databases: A Case Study over Time

“…IFC is an open source data model standard that encodes both geometry and data about objects; it is maintained by the buildingSMART organization [15] and includes definitions about building's elements, such as HVAC equipment, spaces, zones, furniture, and also includes specific properties. Tian and Liu proposed using IFC not only for the purpose of clash detection (this is based primarily just on 3D geometric data), but as a system model with three levels: Pragmatic (identifying services such as fire and life safety, IT communications, and energy management), semantic (physical objects and their attributes), and syntactic (a related set of components such as that which make up a fire safety system, e.g., "smoke detectors, heat detectors, manual call points, switches, etc., or addressable output relays" [16]. Although IFC is gaining some acceptance world-wide including China, in the U.S., IFC is making slow headway [17,18].…”