E. William East

Facility Management Handover Model View

AbstractCurrent specifications for facility handover information require contractors to produce and deliver a set of documents that provide little practical value to the facility manager. Facility managers begin their duties by rekeying the information found in these handover documents. This paper describes the facility management handover (FM) model view definition (MVD), an open-standard information exchange format that may replace current construction handover document requirements. The work was accomplished in conjunction with three buildingSMART chapters to ensure the widest possible international acceptance. The specification of the underlying industry foundation class (IFC) model with required business rules for use in the United States is called the construction-operations building information exchange (COBie) format. Procedures used to test software production and consumption of COBie were developed. Use of COBie has now been documented in several case studies.

Analysis of Three Indoor Localization Technologies for Supporting Operations and Maintenance Field Tasks

AbstractLocating building components that need to be worked on during maintenance tasks is critical for timely repair of the component and mitigation of the damage. The process of locating a component or a person in a facility is called indoor localization. The objective of this research study is to analyze the feasibility of three indoor localization technologies for supporting operations and maintenance (OM namely, wireless local area network (WLAN), radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and inertial measurement units (IMU). These technologies have been selected on the basis of the requirements of the localization needed for supporting O&M field activities. A previous work has been extended, which tested RFID-based locations in an indoor environment, by testing the three selected technologies in the same test bed and using the same hypothesis and fingerprinting approach developed in the previous work. The two main motivations behind using the same test bed and same approach are to h...

Cobie-Based Lightweight Representation of a Building Navigation Network

A navigation network is required for analysis in several activities during various phases of a building lifecycle, such as building accessibility analysis [22], building egress code compliance ([15], [11]), wayfinding [10], indoor positioning [18] and navigation guidance [18]. Various models for representing navigation networks have been proposed in literature [1], such as graph-based, set-based and hybrid models, but there is lack of a standard representation for exchanging navigation network information. We have identified the information requirements for representing navigation networks in AEC domain, such as spatial connectivity, network distance and network geometry, to name a few. The identified requirements have been mapped to existing navigation network representations, such as graph-based, set-based and hybrid models, to create a lightweight representation of navigation networks in the Construction Operations Building Information exchange (COBie) schema [4]. Our developed lightweight representation is based on a hybrid model and involves extending the COBie schema with ‘Node’, ‘Edge’ and ‘Node-Tree’ tables and utilizing the existing ‘Coordinate’ table in the COBie schema. We conclude this paper with a discussion on the implementation of the proposed representation of navigation networks in the COBie schema.

Using IFC Models for User-Directed Visualization

Deriving virtual design walkthroughs from building information models is a specialization of more general interoperability issues encountered in the architect, engineer, construction domain (AECO) where data exchanges are made throughout the facility life cycle between diverse stakeholder groups and software applications. This paper describes a repeatable process for efficiently transforming design coordination view Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) models to multi-user visualization for Radiant, a popular 3D game engine. The adopted transformation process overcomes the inherent difficulties of compiling native geometry in the target visualization platform while supporting two-way traceability of design elements transformed by the underlying data exchanges. The intended audience for this paper includes readers interested in design visualization as well as in AECO data maintenance, integration, and BIM interoperability.

Information Model Purposes in Building and Facility Design

AbstractThis paper introduces three quality indicators—degree of semantic representation, conceptual completeness, and ease of implementation and querying—for different purposes for building inform...