Service-Oriented Approach to Facility Management Using Extended Building Information Modelling

Facility management (FM), from a service-oriented approach, addresses the functions and requirements of different services such as energy management, space planning and security service. Different service requires different information to meet the needs arising from the service. Object-based Building Information Modeling (BIM) is limited to support FM services, though this technology is able to generate 3D models that semantically represent a facility's information dynamically over the lifecycle of the building. This paper presents a semiotics-inspired framework to extend BIM from a service-oriented perspective. The extended BIM, which specifies FM services and required information, will be able to express building service information in the right format for the right purposes. The service-oriented approach concerns pragmatic aspects of the building's information beyond the semantic level. The pragmatics define and provide context for utilization of a building's information. Semiotics theory, adopted in this paper, addresses pragmatic issues of the utilization of BIM for FM services.