Past, Present, and Future of BIM-Enabled Facilities Operation and Maintenance

Abstract

By offering a powerful means to retrieve information from a virtual model of a facility, building information modeling (BIM) has the potential to save the costs borne by owners and operators during facility operation and maintenance (O&M). Currently, researchers and industry professionals require a state-of-the-art overview of the various BIM-related inventions and innovative applications in the facility O&M field. Through a literature review, this paper aims to evaluate and summarize current BIM-O&M research and application developments, analyze research trends, and identify promising future research directions. Publications studied in this research have shown BIM’s capabilities in providing new functionalities for facility managers and supporting them in O&M tasks. Many comprehensive systems are established on the foundation of BIM and they can efficiently acquire, store, and process information, perform analysis to inform facility managers’ decisions, and automate some of the O&M functions.

Keywords

Building information modeling (BIM); Facilities management (FM);
Operation & maintenance (O&M); Literature review.

Download this conference paper
Publisher’s site
Back to publications

Planning and developing facility management-enabled building information model (FM-enabled BIM)

Highlights

  • Theoretical applications of BIM for facilities management are discussed.
  • A proposed FM-enabled BIM implementation is examined in a real-world pilot project, describing in detail the process of planning and developing BIM for its later use during the handover and operations phases.
  • State-of-the-art BIM-enabled strategies and tools are applied on the project to achieve the successful handover of FM-enabled BIM.
  • Lessons learned from the pilot project are discussed, and a framework for future studies in BIM for FM is proposed.

Abstract

Successful implementation of FM-enabled BIM can be achieved with 1) a clear definition of what FM-enabled BIM constitutes, 2) a seamless and practical process of collecting the FM-enabled BIM data throughout project development phases, and 3) a well-executed interoperability plan for exchanging data between BIM tools and facility management systems, such as Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). This research contributes to the body of knowledge by first defining, and examining one of the first few pilots implementation of FM-enabled BIM, and discussing the challenges encountered and the lessons learned, and then by proposing a research framework for future researchers to systematically and strategically build the knowledge foundation on BIM for FM field. The implementation process described and the lessons learned captured in this pilot project provide valuable insights into the successful implementation of FM-enabled BIM.

Keywords

Building Information Modeling (BIM); Facilities management (FM); FM-enabled BIM; COBie; Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs); Integrated Project Delivery; Facility Operation and Maintenance (O&M); BIM-enabled handover

Download this journal paper
Publisher’s page
Back to publications