Developing a Location Aware Building Information Modeling System for Facility Maintenance Management

The indoor localization function is essential for facility management, especially on facility maintenance management (FMM). Meanwhile, FMM can benefit from building information modeling (BIM), which can provide rich geometric and semantic information. Therefore, the integration of real-time location information and BIM can provide more efficient facility management approaches. This paper presents a location aware BIM system that can simultaneously provide customized facility information obtained from BIM and user’s location information to achieve more efficient and intelligent facility management. The developed system firstly extracts required facility information from BIM models using BIM software API. Then, a location aware function is enabled based on the wi-fi fingerprinting technique and the previously extracted information. Lastly, a mobile application is developed to enable facility management staff to obtain the current location and to access required facility information. In addition, the developed system is tested in the HKUST library, which illustrates the efficiency of the developed location aware BIM system.