NIBU: a new approach to representing and analysing interior utility networks within 3D geo-information systems

Facility management departments’responsibilities include monitoring and maintenance of building infrastructure,such as water,gas or electricity.Very often these tasks are completed using paper maps,which make integrated analysis of networks challenging.Ability to consider interior network structure and provide semantic and connectivity information supporting the required analysis operations are thus crucial.This paper presents an approach relying on Building Information Model(BIM)as a data source for obtaining information about interior utilities.The semantic and connectivity information of BIM is mapped onto a new model called Network for Interior Building Utilities(NIBU).NIBU is based on the semantic categorisation of utilities,and the spatial functions that have to be performed.Three scenarios(‘maintenance operation’,‘emergency response’and‘inspection operation’)are developed to test the proposed approach.The model and its functions are implemented in spatial DBMS.The model is populated directly from a BIM server applying an Industrial Foundation Class(IFC)parser developed in-house.Five analysis functions are implemented to support spatial operations:trace upstream,trace downstream,find ancestors,find source and find disconnected.The investigation proves that BIM provides both the required semantics and attributes,and connectivity information that can facilitate analysis of interior utility networks.NIBU provides a simple yet flexible way to manage interior network information,which can be integrated into Digital Earth.

NIBU:An Integrated Framework for Representing the Relation Among Building Structure and Interior Utilities in Micro-Scale Environment

This paper describes a framework for modeling interdependencies between different network systems and building structures.It provides an approach for the integrated analysis of interior building utilities by describing a framework to model and simulate infrastructure interdependencies and their complex behaviors.It is a graph-based spatial model that can support use cases such as providing the location and specifications of interior utilities to a technician who wants to perform a maintenance operation.This location could be needed for maintenance or replacement,or to investigate the result of damage to the building structure on another utility network,or to estimate the effect of different maintenance operations in different locations along utilities service systems.The model accounts for two important aspects:first,the relationship between interior utilities and building elements or spaces and second,the building hierarchy structure to which the utilities network is related.A proper hierarchy of the building is developed which supports the generation of human-oriented descriptions of interior utilities,where a method for partitions of large building element and spaces as well as a method to reference a network element to another building are developed.The connection of the different utilities network systems and buildings are generated using joints,which are based on a containment relation.An example is presented which shows the effectiveness of this approach for supporting maintenance operations,as well as the independences between the maintenance operation location and the other network systems.The paper presents the data model and explains the links with current 3D building model standards.