Product Modeling: Helping Life Cycle Analysis of Roofing Systems

The Building Envelope Life Cycle Asset Management (BELCAM) project is researching methods to predict the service life of roofing systems. Because the IT industry in construction has been “design centric” for a number of decades, very little has been done in the area of the life cycle analysis of existing facilities. However, the design and construction phases of these built assets occupy an insignificant time span in the life cycle of a building and the costs of these two phases are minor in comparison to the life cycle costs (including personnel wages, overheads, etc.) of the operations of that facility. Buildings and urban infrastructure are constructed and maintained to last decades, centuries, and at times, indefinitely. The data, models and supporting software systems that represent these built assets should also serve the facility owner for those same time frames. However, it would be virtually impossible to find and regenerate a simple word processing file from 10 years ago (remember the CP/M operating system and Wordstar). How could a maintenance manager in the year 2020 retrieve data from AutoCAD 14 running on an antique Pentium Pro II from the year 1998. There are two major problems identified above: (1) how to handle the archival and retrieval of historic information, and (2) how to ensure the upwards compatibility of data, systems and models of our existing and proposed assets. This paper proposes using product models to address these issues. Although considerable work has been done in the STEP (STandard for the Exchange of Product model data) and IAI (Industry Alliance for Interoperability), very little can be used currently to address the needs of asset managers. This paper presents a state of the art for product modeling; the focus domain is roofing systems. It identifies the need for data integration, not only for CAD systems but also between financial, maintenance and inventory databases. A prototype product model is presented and discussed for roofing systems.