Evaluation of IFC and Cobie as data sources for asset register creation and service life planning

Operation and Maintenance costs in buildings represent a large part of the total building lifecycle cost. However, project delivery methods in the Architectural, Engineering Construction (AEC) industry are often focused on capital delivery and associated costs, which occur prior to the building handover to owners and occupiers. With the emergence of data specifications such as COBie (Construction and Operation Building information exchange) and the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) open standard, there has been an increased interest in developing approaches that integrate building operation with the capital delivery phases. In this context, this research aims to assess how open BIM standards (i.e. IFC) and data specifications (i.e. COBie) can support information requirements of facility managers. A literature review of current studies on Building Information Modelling (BIM) for facilities management (FM) in general, and on IFC and COBie applications in FM in particular was conducted. Based on the results from the literature review, a use case was developed according to the Information Delivery Manual (IDM) methodology, in order to assess the applicability of IFC and COBie as sources of information for asset register creation and service life planning. The results from this use case highlighted shortcomings in IFC/COBie standards and commercially available tools and suggested improvements. In future work, the proposed research approach will be applied on a wider number of use cases in order to develop a decision support system that utilises asset information from BIM to enable lifecycle cost planning during the use phase of buildings.