Towards Unified Ontology for Modeling Lifecycle Inspection and Repair Information of Civil Infrastructure Systems

Construction Information Modeling (CIM), is a new approach to model all the information related to Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) by integrating this information with 3D models representing the geometrical and spatial... [ view full abstract ]

Construction Information Modeling (CIM), is a new approach to model all the information related to Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) by integrating this information with 3D models representing the geometrical and spatial characteristics of these systems. The main usage of CIM at the time being is limited to the design phase and some aspects of the construction phase of the lifecycle. In order to take full advantage of CIM throughout the lifecycle of CIS, inspection and repair information should be integrated with CIM to have a semantically unified model where all the stakeholders can access the information in a systematic manner. Furthermore, this integration will facilitate analyzing the information collected over time in clear spatial and temporal contexts. The resulting CIM will evolve during the different phases of the lifecycle to reflect the changes related to quality inspection and repair processes during the construction phase, as well as the inspection and maintenance processes during the Operation and Maintenance (O&M) phase. Several studies have proposed extending the usage of BIM/CIM to model defects in the construction and O&M phases. However, the research in this area is still limited and fragmented, and there is a need to streamline the research for reducing duplication in efforts and providing a high-level approach to Inspection and Repair Information Modeling (IRIM) for a specific type of defects (e.g. surface defects). The models should be independent of the type of the structure and can be applied at different phases of the lifecycle (i.e. construction and O&M). The objectives of this paper are: (1) to review the available literature related to extending BIM/CIM for IRIM, (2) to identify the requirements for developing a unified ontology for lifecycle IRIM of CIS, and (3) to develop the basic components of the ontology.