Automated Building Information Models Reconstruction Using 2D Mechanical Drawings

One of the potential benefits of using Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Facility Management (FM) targets enhanced tradespeople performance, facilitated by efficient document management, equipment localization and visualization, and integration of building asset data. However, a major bottleneck towards achieving such a benefit is the lack of BIM. In addition, the owners or the facility managers do not want to invest in generating BIM because manually creating BIM for existing buildings is costly, time-consuming, and requires additional labors with specific skills to maintain. Therefore, the authors aim to build an automated Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing (MEP) BIM reconstruction framework that uses 2D building mechanical drawings. In this paper, the authors proposed a new method of generating 3D mechanical objects based on all available information in drawings, such as equipment schedules, symbols and spatial and topological relations amongst objects. The results have shown that the proposed approach could reconstruct more than 70% of the mechanical components among duct, VAV, AHU, FCU, BCU, diffuser, register, and sensor. Even though the authors were not able to achieve 100% success, it was shown that the proposed method reduced the time for generating the mechanical components and it is a major step towards the development of a BIM to support FM tasks associated with MEP components.