BIM for facilities management: Evaluating BIM standards in asset register creation and service life planning

Operation and Maintenance (O&M) costs in buildings represent a significant part of the total building life cycle cost. However, project delivery methods in the Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry are often focused on the capital delivery stage and associated costs ranging from planning, through design, to construction and handover. Open data standards such as the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and specifications such as the Construction Operations Building information exchange (COBie) provide the capability to capture Facilities Management (FM) data requirements in a structured manner from the early stages of project development. We aim to investigate how and whether IFC and COBie can deliver the data and information about assets required by facility managers within a whole life cycle perspective. We focus on specific use cases including the creation of asset registers and service life planning. However, the methodology adopted can be generalised and applied to any other FM use case. The results show that IFC, COBie and the tested supporting tools exhibited some shortcomings in delivering some of the data entities, types and parameters required for the selected FM use cases. We discuss these shortcomings and propose them as areas for improvement to domain researchers, standardisation bodies and technology providers. Finally, we instigate domain researchers to adopt the proposed methodology and conduct further FM use cases.