Design and development of BIM models to support operations and maintenance

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is one of the most significant technological advancements in recent years that has been adopted by the design and construction industry. While BIM adoption is growing, it can be witnessed that adoption is relatively weak within operational and maintenance (O&M) organisations such as Estate and Infrastructure Management, who would ultimately gain the highest value from utilising BIM. While the challenges of BIM adoption are multifaceted, there is a recurring theme of poor data integration between BIM and existing information management systems. There is a clear gap of knowledge on how to structure a BIM model that allows its efficient use in the O&M phase. Furthermore, there is a lack of claritiy on how to exchange information from a BIM model into an Asset Information Model (AIM). This paper outlines a methodology that enables extraction of BIM-related data directly from a model into a relational database for integration with existing asset management systems. The paper describes the BIM model requirements, development of the extraction platform, database architecture and framework. Furthermore, a case study is presented to demonstrate the methodology. The case study demonstrates that if the BIM model is designed from the start with consideration for the O&M requirements, it can be exploited for development into an AIM. It also shows that a structured approach to object classification within a BIM model supports the efficient exchange of data directly from the BIM model. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.