Lifecycle Management of Facilities Components Using Radio Frequency Identification and Building Information Model

The AECOO industry is highly fragmented; therefore, efficient information sharing and exchange between various players are evidently needed. Furthermore, the information about facility components should be managed throughout the lifecycle and be easily accessible for all players in the AECOO industry. BIM is emerging as a method of creating, sharing, exchanging and managing the information throughout the lifecycle between all the stakeholders. RFID, on the other hand, has emerged as an automatic data collection and information storage technology, and has been used in different applications in AECOO. This research proposes permanently attaching RFID tags to facility components where the memory of the tags is populated with accumulated lifecycle information of the components taken from a standard BIM database. This information is used to enhance different processes throughout the lifecycle. In addition, this research suggests storing other types of BIM information (e.g., floor plans) on RFID tags which is not necessarily related to the components themselves. Having BIM data chunks stored on tags provides a distributed database of BIM and allows data access for different players who do not have real-time access to a central database. In this research, a conceptual RFID-based system structure and data storage/retrieval design are elaborated. The value adding benefits and scope of impact of the proposed approach are discussed. To explore the technical feasibility of the proposed approach, two case studies have been implemented and tested.