Abstract:As the information from diverse disciplines continues to integrate during the whole life cycle of an Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC)
Hospital buildings usually contain sophisticated facility systems and special medical equipment, strict security requirements, and business systems. Traditional methods such as BIM are becoming less capable of real-time updates of building status and big data volume. By proposing innovations both in technique and management—a “continuous lifecycle integration” method based on the concept of Digital Twin (DT) and “early movement” of the general contractor, this paper reported a successful project case in a large hospital in China. The case realized continuous, scheduled integration of static data and dynamic data of more than 20 management systems from the design, construction, pre-O&M phase up to the O&M phase. Then, a DT software system with real-time visual management and artificial intelligent diagnosis modules was developed and deployed in a newly built DT control center. Managers have the ability to grasp the detailed status of the whole hospital by visual management and receive timely facility diagnosis and operation suggestions that are automatically sent back from the digital building to reality. The case has been steadily running for more than a year in the hospital and achieved desired performance by reducing energy consumption, avoiding facility faults, reducing the number of requested repairs, and enhancing the quality of daily maintenance work.
With the amount increasing, the BIM (Building Information Modeling or Building Information Model) data exchange and sharing face a series of challenges including integration of disparate data models, fast information extraction and data consistency maintenance. Since the existing BIM data storing and transferring method based on neutral files or a centralized database cannot meet the above-mentioned requirements, a framework of distributed BIM service on a private cloud platform was proposed. By this BIM service, multi-stage participants store relevant data on their own servers, which are virtually integrated through a CC (cloud computing) platform to form a logically complete BIM. It supports participants to establish, manage and transfer consistent BIM data efficiently with ensuring of data privacy. To achieve this BIM service, a BIM integration and service platform (BIMISP) based on IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) and CC was developed. Proved by experiments, the research achievements are useful for improving the efficiency and quality of information extraction and delivery, ensuring the safety and legality of data sharing during building lifecycle.
Virtual Construction (VC) applications encounter difficulty in sharing and exchanging information with one another due to the long periods of interoperability limitation. To address these issues, an Industrial Foundation Classes-based graphic information model (IFC-GIM) is developed according to the exchange requirement of VC, and using the representations of three models in the IFC schema and its extension by defining the dynamic property set and properties for animation. The three models include the physical object model, the construction information model, and the realistic model. An OpenGL-based VC platform is developed and applied to a 440-m-high building to implement the IFC-GIM. The results demonstrate that the proposed IFC-GIM lays the foundation for data sharing and exchange among VC systems and other IFC-compliant applications, which, in turn, significantly reduces the modeling effort for VC and increases the value of VC results. Furthermore, animation is applied to simulate construction activities by the VC platform in addition to color and transparency, enhancing realistic feelings in 4D applications.
Nowadays, digital construction has become popular when bringing convenience and efficiency to the traditional building construction industry. The primary tool of digital construction is the building information model (BIM). However, from the perspective of general contractors, unresolved puzzles still hinder obtaining the benefits of digital construction. When establishing a unified BIM from submodels provided by subcontractors, there will possibly be incomplete or inconsistent data during model merging. But extracting submodels from unified BIM often includes redundant data, thus making models less usable for subcontractors. It is also difficult for general contractors to effectively and accurately utilize resource information and submodel changes. This paper proposed solutions that depend on the widely adopted industry foundation classes standard to ensure the universality of our methods. First, a model merging algorithm is proposed to support the continuous merge of submodels created by different subcontractors. Second, an instance-level model extraction method based on strongly related entities is proposed, which extracts model instances to the minimum submodel and meets the subcontractor requirements at the same time. Third, the new model storage and indexing method are designed to reduce the complexity of model data and support rapid data retrieval, and a new BIM change detection method based on object metadata is provided. The proposed methods were applied by the general contractor of a large airport project during the construction stage. The application results proved that the proposed methods could ensure the quality of established deepening design models and extracted submodels and significantly reduce human labor by improving efficiency when utilizing BIM, which in turn supported key scenarios throughout the digital construction workflow.
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