Expansion of Building Information Models Using Spatial Databases and Serious Game Platforms for Facility Operations and Maintenance Management

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been regarded as a new and mature methodology to support life-cycle information management of a building. Literature shows that current software applications for facility management (FM) do not adequately reuse BIM data and functions, thus creating problems such as loss of semantic information and degraded performance. This research aimed at development of a new software architecture that utilizes spatial databases (such as PostgreSQL with PostGIS) and serious game platforms (such as Unity) to expand a BIM environment (such as Revit). In a new FM system based on the proposed architecture, accessing BIM-related data is no longer inefficient due to the prior use of indexing BIM geometry data. FM users can interact with the event-replaying function of the system for the devices or building elements inside a facility, in order to review the status of the facility. A demonstrative system, based on a Revit file representing a real-world station, was created to provide users with the aforementioned functionality. The proposed approach can assist the development of a FM system reusing BIM, and FM stakeholders can access BIM data and review various events of their facility in a more efficient and effective way.