IFC-Data for Facility Management - The Future Standard for Exchange of CAFM-Data

摘要

Once construction or renewal of a building is complete, operators and owners are confronted with data from numerous overlapping and incompatible data sources. Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) are combined with individual structured spreadsheet data, alphanumeric information from CAD-systems or other not standardized databases. Making the effort to combine such data in a integrated database specialized software engineers are needed. After a long analysing and design phase they have to develop individual import interfaces and/or manage the import via ODBC interface respectively other elementary database tools. Neutral format standards could help. According to the complexity and manifoldness of facility management processes simple file standard are not sufficient. A product data model for the facilities industry is needed. The IAI (International Alliance for Interoperability)started in 1995 to provide "a universal basis for process improvement and information sharing in the construction and facilities management industries". IAI issued the first full release of its Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) in January 1997. The IFC data model offers possibilities of linking complex spatial structures with the organization structures of occupants and the technical equipment of the building. All necessary element types with their characteristic property sets are already defined. So semantic interpretable information once gathered in a CAFM or planning system could be shared via IFC with any arbitrary target system. In 2005 the working team Facility Management was founded in the German chapter of the IAI. The aim of the group is to identify the basic dataset needed for FM purpose. Further on the software companies participating in the team develop prototypes for IFC based data exchange. In 2007 the first CAFM software with an IFC interface will be available on the German market.