BIM-enabled facilities operation and maintenance: A review

Building Information modeling (BIM) has the potential to advance and transform facilities Operation and Maintenance (O&M) by providing a platform for facility managers to retrieve, analyze, and process building information in a digitalized 3D environment. Currently, because of rapid developments in BIM, researchers and industry professionals need a state-of-the-art overview of BIM implementation and research in facility O&M. This paper presents a review of recent publications on the topic. It aims to evaluate and summarize the current BIM-O&M research and application developments from a facility manager's point of view, analyze research trends, and identify research gaps and promising future research directions. The scope of this research includes the academic articles, industry reports and guidelines pertaining to using BIM to improve selected facility O&M activities, including maintenance and repair, emergency management, energy management, change/relocation management, and security. The content analysis results show that research on BIM for O&M is still in its early stage and most of the current research has focused on energy management. We have identified that the interoperability in the BIM-O&M context is still a challenge and adopting the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Framework is a potential starting point to address this issue. More studies involving surveys are needed to understand the underlying O&M principles for BIM implementation – data requirements, areas of inefficiencies, the process changes. In addition, more studies on the return on investment of the innovative systems are required to justify the value of BIM-O&M applications and an improved Life Cycle Cost Analysis method is critical for such justifications.