Considering that BIM is a tool to manage accurate building information of the whole life cycle, it is suitable to support data for maintenance and deconstruction processes. Potential benefits of using BIM in O&M are significant [2, 6] e.g. as valuable ‘as-built’ (heritage) documentation [7], maintenance of warranty and service information [5, 8], assessment and monitoring [4, 9], energy and space management [4, 10], emergency management or retrofit planning [5, 11]. Despite the fact of that owners will be potentially benefited the most by using the facility model and its embedded knowledge of the facility’s life cycle [12], the use of BIM in O&M is still falling behind design and construction application. It is widely admitted that information requirements of most facility organizations are also quite diverse. Lewis (2012) proposed the abundance of data, as one of the challenges for the facility management in reaching the full potential of BIM. Moreover, considering there is no institutionalized “best practice” for owners to use BIM in the FM sector, it is very common for some owners just to adopt deliverable requirements in the existing contract with another organization, but owners should add their meaningful data needs to achieve the desired closeout requirements [13]. Hence, before the owners could propose their BIM deliverables, they should first have a good understanding of the taxonomy and standards for the information that they really need for.

To support new information workflows and adopt new digital information technologies, some standards of data exchange in the AEC/FM industry are undergoing development, e.g. NBIMs, IFC, COBie, OmniClass and UniFormat the framework of building information classification.

The National Building Model Standard (NBIMS), developed by the buildingSMART alliance (bSa), is an open standard to guide the use of BIM technology for building information exchanges. Meanwhile, the bSa suggests using IFCs (Industry Foundation Classes) as the data exchange standard, since the IFC format is a vendor-independent and open data format for information transferring and integration between digital building models and different kinds of information management systems.

The COBie project initiated in 2006 and funded by U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which aims to identify the information exchange needs of facility maintainers, operators, and asset managers of data available upstream in the facility lifecycle [14]. Although COBie may eventually provide a structure for the seamless transfer of data from BIM applications to FM data systems, nowadays, COBie relies on organizing data in a series of structured and related spreadsheets. It is unavoidable for it to determine how much information is optimal to be included directly in the model.

OmniClass has become an object-oriented standard for BIM data, particularly in terms of the data exchange methods such as the Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie) [13]. UniFormat has emerged as a significant classification structure for specifying building information in a model [15].

To improve the quality of information handover process and BIM deliverables for owners to use in the O&M phase, most of the owners, including large building owners, government agencies and higher education institutions have begun to make specific requirements for BIM implementation, such as BIM guidelines, contractual language and standards.

In the public transit industry, a great number of agencies operate various types of transportation, e.g. light rail, subway, commuter train, bus, streetcar etc. The facility managers and asset planning & programming managers make too much effort to acquire the transition documentation needed to manage their assets (including Complete documented inventory, Equipment quantity and unit costs, Project Asset Assembly quantities and unit costs etc.) and especially when all of the information have been generated from the Design and Construction process already. They spent tens of thousands of dollars currently on a consultant to “regenerate” the lost data for several facilities, since with the right contract specifications for Asset Management, all of these data would be captured during the entire Design and Construction process timely. Meanwhile,the data is available many times in each stage of the process, thus, it should be captured and reviewed when it is available, instead of gathering and submitting the information in the antiquated and fragmented manner such as collecting all of it at the end of the project.

Using BIM for the facility management could creating the equipment inventory lists automatically in the way of populating the owner’s CMMS or CAFM system, which is conducive to reduce the manual efforts and time when enter the documentation into another platform for facility use during the handover process [23]. Moreover, with the characteristic of automatic identification, BIM could also provide existing building condition information of higher precision than AutoCAD, which is extremely beneficial for space managers.

Besides, a huge amount of data, information and files, e.g. contracts, procurement files, warranty information, purchase requests, operation and maintenance manuals and inspection report etc., could be linked or integrated with the BIM model via URL and/or external or internal servers [24], which can save a lot of time and cost for facility managers. Take warranties as example, all warranty information can be retrieved easily and every maintenance action can be recorded with details associated with the maintained component through using BIM, which will supply maintenance workers with a good history record for each component.

Apart from that, it is very beneficial for the asset manager to make a proper decision (e.g., replace, repair, preventive maintenance, or do-nothing) to deal with equipment and facilities in different conditions. As long as there is information about relevant components in BIM, relevant costs can be calculated. The costs of every action can be estimated with the BIM model and it has impact on the whole level of service of the subway station [1].

The online survey was designed to determine the respondents’ experience, interest of BIM application in Facility management, to explore what areas BIM could bring value to the FM and what extent BIM currently utilized in FM field of Urban Railway Transportation industry at the process level. The online survey of 28 questions fell into four distinct parts: a section on demographics, a section on BIM adoption in FM, a section on BIM uses and required format of deliverables.

The survey was hosted on https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/qingliu/252653 through an account created by University of Washington’s School of Build Environment. The survey link was directly distributed to facility owners and managers of transit agency of several transit authorities in different states of US and China, such as Sound Transit Agency (Seattle), Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (New York), Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, Chicago Transit Authority from Nov. 10, 2014 to DEC. 15, 2014 and Beijing, Nanjing, Shenzhen subway authorizes from Jan. 1, 2015 to Mar. 1, 2015.

Before conducting the persona interviews, our research team investigated a typical process of FM organization that is in need of a digital information handover and management tool and is potentially suitable for BIM implementation, after that, the following personas including the link facilities maintenance manager, the facilities project manager, senior facilities coordinators, and senior facilities specialists were selected. Thus, the interviews were conducted to examine FM functions and processes, and how BIM could potentially improve personnel and process efficiency.

The personal interviews were conducted with the support of FM department of Sound Transit agency during March 2015. The face-to-face persona interviews include the following main areas aspects: interviewee’s background, position information, work flow and data requirements, challenges of BIM for FM.

According to the demographic information, the respondents play different roles in their organizations and most of them undertake multiple responsibilities within their organizations. The most common roles indicated by respondents include assistance with asset planning and control, condition assessment, facilities management and maintenance.

When being asked whether they adopted BIM to support any phase of project’s life cycle (design, construction, operations and maintenance stage), 80% of the respondents answered that BIM was adopted in their new projects by their organizations. However, only one-fourth of these organizations were using BIM in the operation and maintenance phase. In this study, The BIM users and non-BIM users were analyzed separately.

As this study focused on utilizing BIM in operations and maintenance stages, the respondents were asked to choose the potential FM application areas that could be brought values by leveraging BIM (Fig. 1).

Fig. (1). Potential FM application areas that BIM can be used for.

When being asked about the convenience of the handover method for different purposes during the O&M phase, the respondents who are not using BIM expressed overall lower satisfaction in the usability of the information handed over than those who are using BIM (Fig. 2).

Fig. (2). Convenience of the information delivery methods for the use of different type of information at the operation and maintenance stage for transit agency.

When asked what information was needed for Asset Management, different respondents according to their working requirements chose the most important and high priority data and information according to their working requirements, which could be concluded as the following Table 1.

If BIM had already been utilized in design and construction phase, with the owners’ information requirements as a guide, it would provide a great opportunity for FM stuff to capture and transfer information effectively and efficiently. Thus, integrating the mentioned data in Table 1, some of these data should be captured in design and construction phase include:

• Data: Equipment/asset information, manufacturer/vendor information, location information, description, and attributes;
• Supporting information: specifications, warranties, operation and maintenance manuals, manufacturer instructions, certificates, and test reports etc.

The owners not only struggle with the amount of data but also with the requirement of numerous data format that need to be provided when delivering the project. In the online survey, when asked about the methods used for managing the information handed over, among the respondents who do not use BIM the most used method is relying on printed or scanned documents with exception of the maintenance records and schedules in which the use of a CAFM or CMMS are the main method. Although the respondents who use BIM there those are also the main methods but in a more balanced fashion, with the exception of warranties and O&M manual where printed or scanned documents is clearly the predominant method. There are a small percentage of respondents who are starting to use BIM for maintenance record, As-Built drawings and space management. This can be observed on Figs. (3 and 4).

Fig. (3). Information management methods for different documentation at the O&M stage for agencies who are not using BIM.

Fig. (4). Information management methods for different documentation at the O&M stage for the agencies who are using BIM.

The interview findings demonstrated that current practice of information handed over for FM work is labor-intensive and the handover deliverables mostly are 2D documents and drawings that are ineffective when being used in O&M phase. The survey indicated that 65% of owners continue to request hard copies via digital media, and a set of scanned documents, excel files, or CAD files are used as part of the as-built deliverable. In addition, although there is the requirement for BIM use, the model is not currently employed for Operations and Maintenance (O&M), reflecting that although BIM models carried part of the information needed for O&M, manually input is still necessary. Only three respondents expressed that they would take an IFC or COBie files as part of the as-built handover package.

In most cases, these electronic files could be editable in the approved version of Microsoft Office suite, Autodesk AutoCAD Map 3D^TM, Civil 3D^TM, Navisworks^TM and Revit^TM et al. Some of them would be submitted to digital media or be uploaded to the owners’ website directly or some other mutually agreeable means accepted by both contractors and owners. The Sound Transit agency is a case in point. The electronic 3D model should be submitted in Navisworks and delivered in NWD, NWC, and NWF formats. The native 3D files used to create the Navisworks model should be submitted in Autodesk Revit.

It is admitted that BIM was first adopted by the designers, and then followed by the contractors. Currently, the industry has realized the importance of BIM for FM and began to develop the application tools to integrate BIM with the facilities management [25]. In spite of that, it is still very slow for the owners to adopt BIM in operation & maintenance management and obtain the potential benefits, partly because most of the information needed by the owners for O&M can be provided by non-graphical format. In addition, the FM industry does not have the knowledge, skillset, time, staff, or funding to conduct FM work by operating BIM Model, which is also an important reason for the difficulty of adopting BIM for FM.

Moreover, the handover process is never easy for the owners, especially in the information distribution process. It has been a big progress since the format of information transfers from hard copies to electronic copies, but the owner is still struggling with a huge amount of information that needs to be distributed to multiple project participants within the organization [20]. Although some owners have begun to use COBie and IFC standards to organize their information, there are still a lot of different information formats, e.g. CAD, Excel, Word, PDF, GIS etc. In general, the application of a new technology is always full of challenge, due to integration and interoperation problem concerning that the information formats you get are not what you really need.

Finally, the biggest challenge for BIM application in FM practices is to define these data requirements, and to identify by whom and when the data should be provided throughout the project life cycle. Moreover, due to BIM models always undergoes dramatic changes during project stages in terms of variety of versions, level of detail, model purpose, and responsibilities of different parties for integrating various discipline models, the owners face much more challenges when using BIM for FM.