Facility Management Handover – Equipment Maintenance

The proposed Facility Management Handover - Equipment Maintenance MVD project updates the specifications of the original bSI 2009 Basic Facility Management (FM) Handover model view definition (MVD) for IFC2x3, focusing information delivery on building equipment operations and maintenance life cycle information based on IFC4.3, as well as a neutral, spreadsheet-based format deliverable. Rather than developing an entirely new IDM, the project will be updating the original 2009 work rather than establishing a whole new paradigm. In addition, it will provide a core framework for other future FM Handover use case data exchanges to be structured and encoded.

This project is being launched alongside a new effort to address the needs of facility management stakeholders, the Facility Management for openBIM project, demonstrating how simultaneous, yet complementary, efforts in the bSI community can effectively solve industry challenges. In this case, the FMH-EM project will enable new FM for openBIM use case requirements to feed an objectively testable, open standard-based, and consistent information exchange deliverable. This should help the FM domain bring solutions to market much more quickly across a wide range of related use cases for FM Handover data.

Project Background

The bSI "Basic FM Handover Model View Definition," published in 2009 and based on IFC2x3, set the stage for what would become the world-wide adoption of independently created national specifications. As these specifications grew is scope and became more widely used, a significant body of lessons learned in their implementations have been documented. In 2020, bSI began this project to recalibrate the growing bifurcation of national specifications from an international basis and re-establish the effort under international governance, refocused scope, and emphasis on global adoption with explicitly specified, but compatible, customization options for localized use.

As international industry experience with producing and using national specifications derived from the Basic FM Handover have grown, so have calls to streamline those national standards and return to a common international foundation. This includes owners who have received conflicting guidance regarding deployment and software companies who have been pressured to support all the different versions of FM handover data.

Some national adaptations and implementations of the original Basic FM Handover standard have force fit the bSI MVD to support infrastructure project handover. Under the governance of the Building Room, the scope of this project is explicitly restricted to the building domain. From a technical point of view, infrastructure FM use cases could be accommodated by the core framework being set up alongside the Equipment Maintenance requirements, but those domain-specific exchange requirements should be vetted and specified by infrastructure domain experts and stakeholders.

The desired outcome of this project is to deliver a prompt and accurate set of building equipment operations and maintenance requirements to a facility manager. There are many added uses for non-geometric building equipment data that fall outside the direct scope of this project. Support for cleaning contracts, inventory control, door key schedules, replace/repair decision making, security accreditation of industrial control systems, and tenant management are but a few examples. As the FM for openBIM project and its stakeholders identify additional use cases, resulting MVD projects can build upon the core data exchange framework established in this project. Doing so will allow other non-geometric data to be captured and directly integrated into existing standards-compliant enterprise-wide information technology platforms.