Modelling maintainability of healthcare facilities services systems using BIM and business intelligence

Abstract

Designing Services Systems is becoming more complex with the raise of the importance of maintainable designs in order to improve the building performance. This research aims at enhancing the maintainability of the systems’ components in healthcare facility at early design stages to ensure better maintenance planning. The research proposes a framework that gathers the inputs from all business parties to assist in building a Maintainability Information Database (MID) that stores the maintenance information of systems components (e.g., costs, maintenance frequency, and code regulations) as well as the data responsibilities matrix. along with the maintainability goals which are used as a baseline in the design stage to evaluate the design options. Eight indicators are introduced to evaluate systems design in healthcare facility buildings with respect to the maintainability aspects. The framework integrates Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Business Intelligence (BI) system to assist in assessing maintainability by developing an add-in tool using C# programming language. The tool extracts all data required for maintainability assessment from the BIM models, runs the computation model for the assessment, and exports all and maintainability information and the assessment results to an interactive Business intelligence Dashboard in a web-based interface. The Business intelligence Dashboard is designated to track maintainability plans for all systems components of the healthcare facility building. The system functionalities are tested on an actual healthcare facility design project to evaluate two different design options and illustrate its capabilities.