IFC-Based Maintenance Budget Allocation

Abstract

Maintenance budget appraisal and allocation is a fundamental activity for the definition of an effective Facility Management (FM) strategy. Once the maintenance policy is set by the assets’ owner, facility managers are asked to compare different maintenance strategies (i.e. preventive vs. corrective) in order to provide a reliable and cost-effective maintenance budget. This can be hindered by unavailability of data for maintenance of building components. Nowadays, Building Information Modelling (BIM) provides plenty of data, but procedures are seldom focused on maintenance costs appraisal and this frequently leads to an intensive data re-elaboration. The objective of this research is to provide a precise maintenance budget appraisal according to different maintenance strategies through the Facility Condition Index (FCI), calculated starting from data stored into an Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) model. Data are stored in IfcAsset elements, using the related property sets. To overcome calculation needs, some additional attributes may be associated to elements and stored in custom property sets. The results of this research are a set of data, procedures and tools that allow the quantification and planning of maintenance expenditure, allowing a proper budget allocation. These procedures and tools answer the need of both designers during new constructions (to prepare the maintenance plan, as required by current Italian laws for public buildings) and asset managers during the digitisation of existing buildings (to store maintenance data and to rely on better appraisals). In this paper a demonstration is presented, with the purpose of showing the proposed methodology and tools. The demonstration has been carried out on some of the architectural and Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing (MEP) components that mainly contribute to the annual maintenance expenditure.