Application of BIM in Environmental Monitoring and Emergency Evacuation Management within Building Operation and Maintenance Phase: A Case Study

The past few decades have witnessed the birth and development of BIM technologies, greatly enhancing the extent, quality and efficiency of the operation and maintenance management of buildings. It is critical that the building... [ view full abstract ]

The past few decades have witnessed the birth and development of BIM technologies, greatly enhancing the extent, quality and efficiency of the operation and maintenance management of buildings. It is critical that the building managing community is aware of this groundbreaking tool. Traditional operation and maintenance management practices are largely hurdled by the difficulty to retrieve precise, real-time, full-scale and multi-dimensional building system data, to which a solution is presented by the combination of BIM technologies with sensor systems, which collect data including occupant presence, utility usage, environmental parameters, etc. Additionally, BIM technologies also present managers with a means to query building system information in case of emergencies, such as locating faulty wires or finding shortest path for evacuation. This paper takes a recently constructed building in Shenzhen, China as an example, and looks into how BIM-based management system may exploit sensors implemented inside the building to help exert efficient environmental monitoring, and provide assistance for managing emergency evacuations.