Building Lifecycle Management System for Enhanced Closed Loop Collaboration

In the past few years, the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry has carried out efforts to develop BIM (Building Information Modelling) facilitating tools and standards for enhanced collaborative working and information sharing. Lessons learnt from other industries and tools such as PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) – established tool in manufacturing to manage the engineering change process – revealed interesting potential to manage more efficiently the building design and construction processes. Nonetheless, one of the remaining challenges consists in closing the information loop between multiple building lifecycle phases, e.g. by capturing information from middle-of-life processes (i.e., use and maintenance) to re-use it in end-of-life processes (e.g., to guide disposal decision making). Our research addresses this lack of closed-loop system in the AEC industry by proposing an open and interoperable Web-based building lifecycle management system. This paper gives (i) an overview of the requirement engineering process that has been set up to integrate efforts, standards and directives of both the AEC and PLM industries, and (ii) first proofs-of-concept of our system implemented on two distinct campus.