A web-based application to integrate Building Management System sensor data and Building Information Model data to support facility management tasks

The facility managers are responsible for keeping the building conditions and services at a satisfactory level for the facility users while aiming to decrease the operational and maintenance cost. Due to the diversity of data sources necessary to achieve these goals, several IT solutions exist to aid the information management and facility management tasks. Moreover, BIM models are being popularized as part of the handover documentation, which brings possibilities for an object-oriented and semantic approach to deal with building data management and better visualization capability of the building systems. However, these IT tools from different vendors are not easily integrated what creates islands of information, preventing the facility manager from quickly obtaining the overall status of the building. Therefore, this thesis targets the problem of information management to support facility management tasks in a decentralized approach using web technologies to loosely-coupled integrate BIM data with BMS data. This topic was explored through two study cases and the development of a proof of concept application. The evaluation included the BIM requirements to be web compliant using semantic web technologies, the common problems found in the BIM models delivered in the handover stage, the system architecture to enable this integration including the process and display of BIM data and BMS data, and the potential use cases of this approach for the facility managers. The results showed that a web app has the potential to retrieve the information from different O&M data sources, associate them to the building elements using the BIM data as its central reference, and display them in an easily readable way. This can be used to support tasks in the maintenance, logistics, spatial management, safety, indoor conditions, and cost management areas. Although, the current app layout is better developed to support the visualization of indoor conditions and energy consumption sensors. The main system requirements are an easy to use interface, adaptable for portable devices, that don’t rely on technical knowledge from the facility manager. Moreover, the system preconditions are that the BIM model needs to be converted to an RDF graph and included in a triplestore and that the BMS handles the sensor data storage and its API allows third-party access to this information.