Research
As facility management is a relatively young profession, there is still much to explore. Rapid developments in technology such as Smart Cities, Smart Buildings, BIM are a great opportunity to make our lives better and easier – but they also pose great dangers. The new technologies have also made us more vulnerable to attacks from outside and terrorism. Cyber security is becoming more and more important.
Optimisation and Evaluation of a 3D Building
Data Model (IFC Standard) for Facility Man-
agement
A research project for 
Kerstin Hausknecht, Thomas Liebich, Matthias Weise (AEC3)
Markus Groll (ISAR1 ag)
Rudolf Juli (OBERMEYER PLANEN + BERATEN)
OBJECTIVE OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT
The management and maintenance of buildings often commences with the recapturing of already existing building data. Frequently the necessary planning data are not supplied, or not in time, or are available in differing, often unstructured formats.
The goal of the research project was to re‐duce the resulting additional workload by means of the enhanced integration of design and facility management (FM): The basis of the project is formed on the one hand by the Building Information Modelling (BIM) approach, which brings together the required technical information in just one 3D building model, and on the other by the international Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard, which permits the multivendor exchange of the 3D building models and hence also their transfer to FM.
SUMMARY OF THE RESULTS
With regard to achieving the goals that were set the project has contributed to the following as‐pects:
- Description of the requirements placed by FM processes on the design
- Utilisation of the IFC data structure for transfer of design data to FM
- Scenarios for the incorporation and preparation of IFC models in FM
- Implementation and tests with available software and prototypes
An abridged report can be downloaded here