FM-BIM Preparation Method and Quality Assessment Measures

BIM is designed to be used during the whole lifecycle of a facility. It has great potential to be used by owners and facilities managers to improve various processes during the Operation and Maintenance phase (O&M). However,... [ view full abstract ]

BIM is designed to be used during the whole lifecycle of a facility. It has great potential to be used by owners and facilities managers to improve various processes during the Operation and Maintenance phase (O&M). However, its use during the operation phase remains significantly limited. One of the main barriers to the adoption of BIM for Facilities Management (FM) is that the BIM models provided at the handover stage are not readily useable and require extensive modifications and improvements by FM personnel. These models are mainly prepared to be used during the design and construction phases and lack considerations regarding FM requirements. They usually contain unnecessary details and lack significant information relevant for facility managers. Although industry standards, such as COBie, provide templates for the required data items to be transferred to the operation phase, they do not contain guidelines to ensure the ease of use, efficiency, interoperability, and maintainability of models. The proposed FM-BIM model is a live model that evolves from the as-built model to include a facility’s as-maintained information. It includes additional data items and should be able to handle a large number of updates, manipulations, and queries on the data. This research is based on a collaborative investigation between the academia and industry to identify BIM quality assessment criteria considering FM requirements. In this paper, various applications of BIM for FM are investigated, and the modeling and data requirements for them are identified. To identify the gaps, current methods and practices for delivering BIM models in the industry are analyzed and a practical guideline for the preparation of a FM-BIM is proposed.