A BIM-based Facility Management Framework for Automatic Scheduling of Maintenance Work Orders

Although facility management (FM) software and computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) are available for facility maintenance management (FMM), they are currently used for solely storing and organizing information related to facility operation and maintenance (O&M), but not for making facility maintenance decisions directly. Therefore, the decision making process of scheduling a large number of facility maintenance work orders and tasks is still manual and tedious. As a relatively new field in the AEC/FM industry, building information modeling (BIM) has a great potential not only in visualization and management of rich information of building components in 3D models, but also in facilitation and optimization for facility O&M. This paper presents an automatic work-order scheduling framework based on BIM and FM software for efficient facility maintenance decision making. The framework connects FM software and BIM software for synchronizing facility components and work-order information in these two systems. It enables FM staff to check real-time maintenance work orders in BIM models and properly locate the corresponding components. Moreover, the developed workorder scheduling framework contains a dynamic programming engine based on modified Dijkstra’s algorithm for finding the shortest maintenance path among broken components. The engine considers problem type, maintenance tools, emergency level and distances between broken components. It is an automatic decision making process to make maintenance management more convenient. A campus case scenario is presented to demonstrate the developed framework and validate the dynamic programming algorithm.