Virtual building maintenance: Enhancing building maintenance using 3D-GIS and 3D laser scanner (VR) technology

The renovation and refurbishment market is rapidly expanding within the construction industry, bringing the role of the Facilities Management (FM) department to the forefront. Operating and maintaining a facility however, takes the biggest proportion of the lifecycle cost of a building, which can be costly and time consuming. The wide spread and use of advanced technologies within the construction industry can be used to drive the productivity gains by promoting a free-flow of information between departments, divisions, offices, and sites; and between themselves, their contractors and partners. The paper describes a scope in the INTELCITIES project undertaken by 75 partners including 18 cities (Manchester, Rome, Barcelona, etc), 20 ICT companies (Nokia, IBM, CISCO, Microsoft, etc) and 38 research institutes (University of Salford from UK, CSTB from France, UPC from Spain, etc) across Europe to pool advanced knowledge and experience of electronic government, planning systems, and citizen participation across Europe. The scope includes capturing digital data of existing buildings using 3D laser scanning equipment and showing how this data can be used as an information base for enhancing the refurbishment process and maintenance. Furthermore, the paper discusses the state of the art for operating and maintaining facilities, describing the prevailing methods of building maintenance, highlighting their limitations with proposed alternatives, such as 3D Geographic Information Systems ‘3D GIS’ to enable the spatial analysis and static visualisation of critical of query outputs and 3D laser scanning technology for obtaining the digital information of existing buildings for construction maintenance.