BIM applications and sustainable facility management guidelines – a survey

In the past decades, technological advancements have disrupted classical real estate research, stimulating a technology-driven real estate sector strongly affected by computer-aided facility management. One of the major challenges in real estate research is to precisely model the distributed-collaborative efforts of project stakeholders relevant to facility management (FM). Supporting the collaboration, building information modeling (BIM), widely used in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, has the potential to advance facility management activities and to distributedly allocate FM activities to different stakeholders based on BIM standards. A building information model is a digital representation of geometric and functional characteristics of a facility that may serve as a shared knowledge source for FM. Furthermore, during the life-cycle of a facility, a building information model may form a reliable basis for decision making in facility management relevant to the real estate sector. Despite the apparent interrelation between facility management and building information modeling, BIM applications have not been incorporated into sustainable facility management guidelines. This contribution presents a survey of BIM applications and the potential to be deployed for sustainable facility management. Interfaces between BIM applications and sustainable facility management guidelines are investigated, with strong emphasis on the German GEFMA 160 sustainable facility management guideline. Serving as an illustrative example, GEFMA 160 is compared with real estate-relevant BIM applications commonly used in the AEC industry, showcasing the practicability of BIM applications for implementing sustainable facility management criteria in the real estate sector.