Development of a BIM-based cyber-physical system for facility management of buildings

In the wide facility management context, several processes such as operations, maintenance, retrofitting and renovations ensure that buildings comply with the principles of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Besides ordinary operation, facility management is responsible for renovation of building facilities and long-term improvement of their performances. In such a scenario, the cyberphysical system (CPS) paradigm with holonic architecture, that will be reported in this paper, can successfully advice the operation management of buildings, as well as long-term refurbishment processes. Indeed and in analogy with the manufacturing field, the developed CPS exploits holons self-configuration and self-organization and overall throughput effectiveness (OTE) metrics, in order to detect the best corrective actions towards system improvements. As a consequence, suggestions and lessons learnt from the evaluation of building efficiency are re-directed to the BIM model. Hence, the digital model acts not only as a repository of currently available equipment for operations management, but also as a repository of the history of the diagnoses that supports decision making during maintenance, retrofitting and renovation processes. As a matter of fact, the repeated detection of a specific issue, since not affected by operations management, should be read as an opportunity to act and enhance the capabilities of buildings components. According to this approach, an automatic real-time diagnosis method is tested in a test case consisting of a multi-use and large public building.