Historically, the owners always chosen the most cost-effective construction solutions, this because the construction was considered the biggest expense. ‘Studies conducted in several countries, for different types of buildings, show that the annual costs involved in the buildings operation and maintenance varies between 1% and 2% of its initial cost. This may seem small, but over the buildings life cycle gets to be equivalent to or above the cost of the construction’ [1]. This mentality arises from the lack of knowledge of what means the life cycle of a building. In the figure below you can see that the construction is just one of the costs involved in the building whole life cost.
Author: Joel Soares; António Ruivo Meireles
Country: Portugal
Company: ndBIM Virtual Building
- INTRODUCTION
1.1. Facilities Management (FM)
Historically, the owners always chosen the most cost-effective construction solutions, this because the construction was considered the biggest expense. ‘Studies conducted in several countries, for different types of buildings, show that the annual costs involved in the buildings operation and maintenance varies between 1% and 2% of its initial cost. This may seem small, but over the buildings life cycle gets to be equivalent to or above the cost of the construction’ [1]. This mentality arises from the lack of knowledge of what means the life cycle of a building. In the figure below you can see that the construction is just one of the costs involved in the building whole life cost.
Recently, the awareness of owners to the real costs has increased; they also consider the costs after construction. This change of mindset leads to some necessary technological developments in order to track the progress.
1.2. Building Information Modeling (BIM)
‘Technology, coupled with owner demands for better, faster, less costly projects and processes that are more effective, is driving change in the design and construction industry’ [3]. Thus, BIM arises as a solution to an aged industry and attached to old processes. The BIM concept is a sharing information method among the various stakeholders, which is based on a digital model of the building where all this information lies.
The Building Information Model is ‘a data-rich, object-oriented, intelligent and parametric digital representation of the facility, from which views and data appropriate to various user’s needs can be extracted and analyses to generate information that can be used to make decisions and improve the process of delivering the facility’ [4].
1.3. BIM-FM
Development of the technology for building management lead the facility manager role to comprise a wider range of disciplines, increasing the importance of a proper information administration. BIM methodology, being a collaborative tool allows accessibility to an updated information provided by all stakeholders.
Thus, in a very succinct way, the implementation of the BIM-FM methodology is the application of facilities management through the functionalities provided by the BIM model, such as the geometric model and the database containing all necessary information of all elements [5].
- BIM-FM IMPLEMENTATION
2.1. Construction-Operations Building information exchange (COBie)
The COBie format is the international standard for the exchange of information about managed facility assets [6].
COBie’s focus is on delivering the building information that is not geometric. Its purpose is to exchange information that is gathered during construction to be further passed on to a building's facility manager. This approach leads to a change in the way that information is gathered, representing an added value to the owner.
2.2. Model Integration
Frequently it is assumed that an As-built model should have a LOD500 (geometric and non-geometric) and some authors also affirm that, for FM, it should be used an As-built model, because it must contain the final changes made during the construction and all the data. This looks correct, but an FM model does not have the same requirements as a Construction model. So it should be used an As-built model, but an evolution of the model used for the Construction or Design phases.
In the Construction phase, is usually used a LOD300 (geometric) for the general buildings, because currently the requirements for construction do not demand high detailed models and it is enough for quantity takeoff, clash detection, scheduling and budgeting. In some cases, when pre-fabrication is used, it’s necessary a higher LOD – LOD400/500 (geometric) – is necessary due to the level of precision and the detail that is demanded.
The Operation and Maintenance phase focus mostly on handling with the non-geometric data, so it´s correct to state that, for an FM model, the components doesn’t need the same level of detail as the other phases. In fact, considering that most of all BIM-FM applications are Software as a Service (SaaS), the size of the model file is one of the most important points, when considering the LOD that should be used.
It is also important to consider that the As-built model is not the final model, since with FM the model is always updated with the last changes made during the OM phase, becoming an As-managed model. An As-managed model, do not have a higher LOD, since it does not have more information, it has an update for the current conditions [5].
Thus, since LOD definitions have both geometrical and non-geometrical aspects, but only the geometric requirements are specified, a new approach to LOD requirements could be adding the non-geometrical requirements as well.
- CASE STUDY
This case study is an existing building which does not have any type of BIM model or management system. For this implementation, it was decided to use ArchiCAD as the modeling software and ArchiFM.net as the BIM-FM solution. This type of information is critical to the development of the implementation plan, which is divided into 5 phases:
- Requirements Definition;
- Data Gathering;
- Modeling of the School Center according to the requirements definition;
- Integration with BIM-FM solution;
- Development of FM Database.
3.1. Requirements Definition
Defining the requirements is extremely important to establish the purpose of the model, in order to gather and model only the really necessary data. Introducing unnecessary information will make the process longer, besides it will make the model heavier. Based on a list of features required some FM softwares were tested and the natural choice was to use ArchiFM.net. One of the advantages is that it does not have a 3D viewer, since it take advantage of ArchiCAD there is no problem with the size of the model. Another important thing is that in the future the owner does not have to rely on the supplier to update the model since ArchiFM.net allows him to do it by himself. For this case, the following features were considered necessary:
- Contract Management
- Maintenance
- Stock Management
- Establishment of key performance indicator (KPI’s) for Benchmarking
3.2. Data Gathering
At this stage, it was considered not only gathering the data related to the drawings of the Center, required to modeling, but also the necessary information to manage it. The building data is in digital format and represent the as-built.
3.3. Modeling of the School Center
The modeling of the Center was performed according to the existing drawings. However, due to some changes made after construction, about which there is no information, a verification on field of these changes was necessary in order to represent the current state of the building, as-managed.
When performing the modeling of the Center, the information gathered for the equipment was also inserted. As seen in the figure below, during the modeling, both geometric and non-geometric LOD requirements were fulfilled. Another matter that must be taken into account in concerns to the specifications required for integration with the BIM-FM solution. In the figure below, you can also see a zone model, one of the requirements of the modeling.
3.4. Integration with BIM-FM solution
One of the most important steps in BIM-FM implementation is the connection between the modeling software and the management solution. It is important to ensure that both solutions are mapping the same fields, in order to guarantee that all the data that is inserted in the model is synchronized with the management solution.
After modeling the building and the data insertion into the right components, this was synchronized with the Archifm.net.
From this point, the whole process of management is done in ArchiFM.net which is updated when necessary with the BIM model.
3.5. Development of FM Database
After its synchronization, is created the remaining necessary data. While most of the components data were automatically synced with the model, all the data related to organizations, employers, contracts, maintenance plans and others had to be inserted and created in the application. The insert of data was done mostly through Excel sheets, using predefined templates to ensure that all the parameters were correctly mapped and in a few cases it was manually inserted in the browser application.
Although the application has some formatted reports, it was also necessary to customize the reports to fulfill all the requirements regarding to KPI’s.
- CONCLUSIONS
The implementation of a BIM-FM solution has to be carefully planned, due to the amount of possibilities that have to be taken into account.
The utilization of this methodology also highlighted that the current association of the LOD with the building life phases does not match the real needs of the OM phase. Even though in the importance of 3D building model to FM, this does not mean that the model needs to have a high level of geometric detail. A new classification is suggested, where the LOD definition also shows its data requirements detached from the geometric information.
- REFERENCES
[1] NBR 5674:1999 Building Maintenance – Procedure. Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT). Rio de Janeiro.
[2] BS ISO 15686-5:2008 Buildings and constructed assets. Service life planning: Part 5: Life cycle costing. British Standards Institution (BSI), London, 52.
[3] Jernigan, F. E. Big BIM little BIM: the practical approach to building information modeling: integrated practice clone the right way. Salisbury, Maryland: 4Site Press, 2007.
[4] Azhar, S., Hein, M. and Sketo, B. Building Information Modeling (BIM): Benefits, Risks and Challenges. Available at http://ascpro.ascweb.org/chair/paper/CPGT182002008.pdf. Last visit 17 May 2013.
[5] Soares, J. The BIM-FM methodology applied to a practical case. MSc dissertation, School of Engineering – Polytechnic of Porto, 2013.
[6] East, B., & Carrasquillo‐Mangual, M. The COBie Guide: a commentary to the NBIMS‐US COBie standard. 12/3/2013. Available at http://projects.buildingsmartalliance.org/files/?artifact_id=4994. Last visit 20 June 2014.