Finnish and German talents are uniting their know how in BIMLIFE-project that started in September 2018 when experts from Granlund and Fraunhofer Institute had their first kick off meeting.
Building information model (BIM) methods are widely used both in Finland and Germany when it comes to design and construction phase of the building. In Germany BIM is already mandatory in the design phase of transport and infrastructure projects.
“It is still an open research topic to apply BIM in the facility management. The challenge in both countries is that BIM models have not yet been utilized in operations”, says Hervé Pruvost from Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS Division Engineering of Adaptive Systems EAS.
Commonly BIM stands for building information modelling, in BIMLIFE “modelling” is substituted with “management” since most of the modelling has already been done in design.
The project aims at developing a BIM-based digital platform for the lifecycle information management of building assets. The Finnish-German research team has at least 13 members. Team members who took part in the kick off meeting were excited about the project though benchmarking is difficult.
“Nothing like this exists yet”, says Tuomas Laine, the director of Granlund’s Innovations department.
BIMLIFE will harness Big Data to improve decision making in building management – and not just for one building at the time but for entire building portfolio that can consist of tens or hundreds of buildings. BIM-based digital platform will make possible to optimize the costs and energy consumption and make clear plans for maintenance in a much larger scale than what we are used to.
“There will be optimized operations plans for increasing wellbeing and productivity of the building users”, says Pruvost.
At least two actual buildings such as the Campus Arena in Tampere are being used as pilots in the project. There are also technologies that will be explored in the project such as machine learning, AI, mixed reality, Digital Twin and of course BIM.
“When developing the platform, we need to integrate different sources of data”, Pruvost says.
“The Digital Twin concept – or the Virtual Property like we call it in Granlund – is such a good possibility to develop this”, Laine says.
The vendors for the project are The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and Business Finland.
Read more about BIMLIFE project:
BIMLIFE Project Brochure (PDF)
