Inspection Data Exchange and Visualization for Building Maintenance using AR-enabled BIM

After the COVID-19 outbreak, a new concept of building maintenance (BM) systems is needed because current approaches highly rely on physical contact between workers, engineers, and managers. It imposes health and safety risks as increasing concerns about infections and spreads. This adds burdens to take unavoidable close contact and health risks to building owners, occupants, workforce, and society at large. In this respect, a new BM system was developed that enables reliable virtual communication and reduces BM response times by filling gaps between users and building managers. The proposed system is based on a concept of a cyber-physical system (CPS) using augmented reality (AR) and building information modeling (BIM) to promote non-contact building management. In this system, AR plays an important role in inspecting and visualizing defects in the real world, and the detected defect information is stored and managed by cloud-based BIM in cyberspace. This paper focuses on data visualization and management in the CPS-based non-contact building management system. A cloud-based database and mobile application are developed for data management purposes. In addition, this paper presents BIM data exchange and visualization in AR applications. Target image-based localization and tracking in BIM are also tested. The test results showed that the model alignment and localization accuracy are reliable for building maintenance works. Using the new BM mechanism, we expect that the related workers, building owners, and occupants will experience a reliable building maintenance process based on CPS-based information exchange from both users and facility managers while maintaining social distance.