Building Information Model and Optimization Algorithms for Supporting Campus Facility Maintenance Management: A Case Study of Maintaining Water Dispensers

Effective management for the maintenance of water dispensers dispersed throughout an academic campus is essential for ensuring the quality of drinking water. Conventionally, water dispenser maintenance is conducted approximately bimonthly or when a passive fault notice is obtained. This maintenance frequency usually results in ineffective allocation of maintenance staff and poor maintenance quality. This study proposes a new model for campus facility maintenance management that enables maintenance staff to maintain water dispensers at the optimal time and select the shortest maintenance path. The proposed model was developed using the maintenance information of the Construction Operations Building Information Exchange obtained from building information models of multiple buildings, water dispenser operation data from a water dispenser monitoring module, and an optimization algorithm developed by integrating Dijkstra’s algorithm, simulated annealing, and a genetic algorithm to identify the shortest maintenance path. The proposed model was tested on a campus in Northern Taiwan. The application results revealed that maintenance strategies could be systematically established to determine the optimal time to dispatch maintenance staff based on the lowest unit cost criterion; this approach was also used to identify the shortest maintenance path through multiple buildings.