BIM-Based Life-Cycle Management for Reinforced Concrete Buildings

This paper introduces the concept of a BIM-based life-cycle management system for reinforced concrete buildings. The system allows one to compute a prognosis of the building’s condition taking into account the material properties of individual components, the environmental load as well as measurement data from current inspections. This prognosis then forms foundations for scheduled maintenance and repair actions in an economically efficient way. A particularly important feature of the presented system is that all input data as well as the computational results are associated with a (full) 3D Building Information Model (BIM) of the construction. In this way, an easy localization of the information is achieved facilitating both the data collection and the estimation of the building condition for engineers involved in inspection planning, inspection or the scheduling of repair actions. To further facilitate data input and interpretation, a hierarchic level-of-detail approach is employed for structuring the building model, ranging from building level down to individual hot spots. Additionally, the integration of a meta-model allows the flexible adaption of the semantic data model to specific buildings types or the particular needs of the users. DOI: 10.4018/ij3dim.2012010101 2 International Journal of 3-D Information Modeling, 1(1), 1-24, January-March 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Conventionally, maintenance planning is performed manually. In recent years however, computer-aided life-cycle management systems (LMS) have been developed to support the maintenance planner in a suitable way. The most basic LMS supports maintenance planning by capturing inspection data and assigning grades according to the condition to buildings or individual components. More advanced systems perform a deterioration prognosis which enables the user to simulate the future condition of the building and evaluate different maintenance strategies. So far, the user interfaces of these systems have been mainly restricted to simple lists containing numerous building components, their individual exposure and current condition, rendering it difficult to keep an overview and identify distinct hotspots. This paper introduces the concept of a life-cycle management system which is based on a building information model. A building information model is a digital representation of a real building which comprises of not only the detailed 3D geometry but also a semantic description of its individual components and their relationships (Eastman et al., 2008; Underwood & Isikdag, 2009). The concept of using Building Information Modelling (BIM) during the planning phase has gained increasing importance during the last few years. This paper shows how BIM can also bring severe benefit to the operational phase if it is used as the basis of a life-cycle management system. A 3D building information model allows one to easily assign material properties, environmental loads as well as inspection and measurement results to the individual components of the building. They are then unambiguously located in/on the virtual building and can form the basis for a detailed life-cycle prognosis and maintenance planning. Due to the very flexible handling of nongeometric data, the developed system can be used for any type of construction made from reinforced concrete, including bridges and high-rise buildings. 2. RELATED WORK There have been several life-cycle management systems for bridges and reinforced concrete buildings developed over the last few years. Examples include SIB-Bauwerke in Germany (Abram, 2003), KUBA-MS in Switzerland (Haller & Bascuro, 2006), DANBRO in Denmark (Henriksen, 1999), Eirspan in Ireland (Duffy, 2004), BridgeLife, MaintenanceMan and ServiceMan in Finland (Vesikari, 2006, 2008), Pontis (Robert et al., 2003) and BRIDGIT (Hawk, 1999) in the USA and the Ontario Bridge Management System in Canada (Thompson et al., 1999). There has also been high research activity over the last few years aimed at the development of more advanced life-cycle management systems (e.g., Frangopol et al., 2001; Frangopol & Neves, 2003; Neves et al., 2006; Hammad et al., 2006; Okasha & Frangopol, 2010). In principal the existent systems can be categorized into four groups: • Systems for mere data management which are not able to compute prognoses (e.g., Henriksen, 1999; Duffy, 2004). These systems store the data gained at routine inspections as well as the reports of maintenance carried out. Both DANBRO and Eirspan also have functionalities to estimate maintenance costs, Eirspan can also optimise the maintenance schedule in order to minimize the costs produced by the maintenance as well as by postponing it. The development of the condition cannot be estimated. • Systems with deterministic deterioration models (e.g., Abram, 2003). In these systems a condition prognosis can be achieved on the basis of deterministic models. Different parts of the bridge are each assigned a lifetime, after which they have to be replaced. The system supports the user by listing repair measurements to be performed. 22 more pages are available in the full version of this document, which may be purchased using the "Add to Cart" button on the product's webpage: www.igi-global.com/article/bim-based-life-cyclemanagement/62567?camid=4v1 This title is available in InfoSci-Journals, InfoSci-Journal Disciplines Engineering, Natural, and Physical Science. Recommend this product to your librarian: www.igi-global.com/e-resources/libraryrecommendation/?id=2