Building lifecycle management

Our proposal concerns ongoing research at the University of Burgundy, in collaboration with Active3D-Lab Company, for the development of a method to manage civil engineering projects and corresponding facilities management. This method is made up of processes, specific models and tools. The processes make it possible to structure the various phases, codified by professionals, which organize the lifecycle of buildings. Construction and a building's life information comes from heterogeneous sources (heterogeneity of professions, heterogeneity of data formats, and heterogeneity of validation processes). We propose an innovative approach which gives a global view of a buildings lifecycle including facilities management aspect. This approach is based on a data model standard called IFC which was developed by the International Alliance for Interoperability. A collaborative Internet platform was developed to support the building lifecycle. This platform is mainly used to federate all the actions realized on a building during its lifecycle, to merge all information relating to these actions in an adaptive hypermedia graph, to extract some trade views of the building by combining information collected during the lifecycle from heterogeneous sources and to handle all these views through a dynamic and adaptive 3D interface. This platform won the technological innovation gold medal at the international show BATIMAT in Paris in November 2003.