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The Operation and Maintenance (O&M) phase can account for as much as 80% of the overall lifecycle cost of a project. The inputs from O&M practitioners are often not incorporated during the design phase leading to maintainability issues during the O&M phase, which results in significant costs and hinders building performance. Traditionally, design communication with practitioners is conducted using 2D drawings and in some more advanced projects, with Building Information Models (BIMs). Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to facilitate maintainability-focused design input from O&M practitioners, but this application has not been studied in detail. This paper addresses the gap by examining the usability of VR for providing access-related maintainability inputs. A quasi-experimental approach was adopted to evaluate the difference in access-related inputs provided by sixteen O&M practitioners, once using 2D drawings and BIM and again using VR. We assessed the variation in time for O&M practitioners to provide the inputs and the perceived quality of the inputs using the two design communication methods. We also examined the effect of practitioners' years of experience on providing access-related maintainability inputs using VR. The results suggest that there was no statistically significant difference in the access-related maintainability inputs provided using the two design communication methods, which demonstrates that O&M practitioners could provide similar access-related inputs using VR and traditional means of communication using 2D drawings and 3D models. The results also show that O&M practitioners were able to provide inputs significantly faster using VR. The O&M practitioners also reported that VR facilitated ease of use and high confidence in their inputs. Furthermore, the practitioners' years of experience did not lead to any variation in the access-related inputs provided and the time efficiency of providing the inputs. While the small sample size limits the generalizability of the results, the study acts as a proof of concept on the usability of VR for improving O&M practitioner input on the maintainability of building designs.

The promise of Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Facilities Management (FM) is based upon building information models as reliable sources of information for decisions during a facility’s life cycle, from the planning to end of life. However, the premise of BIM as an enabler for the delivery of reliable information for FM has numerous challenges. Previous studies have shown that the quality of information provided through current design practices with BIM is inadequate for FM. These information quality (IQ) issues are mostly related to incomplete, inaccurate, inconsistent, and unintelligible facility information that ultimately reduce the usefulness of BIM-based information for FM purposes. In order to support BIM-enabled delivery of useful asset information for FM, certain IQ criteria must be met. Based on three ethnographic case studies, including the analysis of more than two thousand documented BIM for FM-related compliance issues, this research identifies ten key IQ criteria in design BIMs that must be considered to reliably support BIM use for FM, correlates these IQ criteria with key IQ dimensions identified in the literature to reflect their frequency of occurrence, and identifies sources of IQ issues in BIM for FM within design practice. A mixed-method approach for data collection from the case studies is adopted, including document analysis, semi-structured interviews, meeting observation, and a survey. The data collected are analyzed through an iterative coding process, in which the themes emerged are refined and tested as part of a grounded theory approach. This study contributes to the development of the theoretical concept of IQ in BIM for FM that is grounded in data from actual projects with stringent BIM requirements for FM and thorough compliance processes. As a practical contribution, the findings in this study should enable owners and designers to develop a more optimized asset information delivery process, increasing the value of the information in design BIMs for operations with minimal impact on current modeling practices.

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The spread of fire and smoke during a fire incident plays a crucial role in rescuing people from the burning building. So it is important for the decision makers (the head of rescue staff) to get a prediction about the spread of fire inside the building through computational techniques like numerical fire simulations. But these techniques require advanced mathematical knowledge and are very time consuming. This paper presents a new method which employs a set of presimulated and model-based scenarios to find the closest one to the real fire and present its results to the decision makers. For this purpose, we shift the performance consuming numerical fire simulations into a former phase by integration of these simulations into the planning process of the building. This is realized by enhancing the methods of Building Information Modeling (BIM). To provide the fire simulation results during a real case, our new concept includes a scenario database where all simulated fire scenarios will be collected. In a real case, a special search algorithm will go through this database to find the closest pre-simulated fire scenario to the real fire on the basis of reported information from the burning building.