Role-based access to facilities lifecycle information on RFID tags

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based systems have been used in different applications in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner and Operator (AECOO) industry. Applications are mainly designed for specific lifecycle stage of the facility and serve the needs of only one of the stakeholders. This would increase the cost and the labor for adding and removing tags and eliminate the chance of using shared resources. In this paper, the usage of tags permanently attached to components is proposed where the memory of the tags is used during the lifecycle by different stakeholders for data storage and handover. A Building Information Model (BIM) database is used for tackling the interoperability issues allowing different users to access and share the data. To securely and efficiently store data on RFID tags in ifcXML format, multi-level encryption together with role-based access control is applied on the data stored on RFID tags. Each user is assigned a certain role and can only access the part of data for which he has authorization according to a predefined role and the Access Control Policy. To explore the technical feasibility of the proposed approach, a case study considering both facilities management and emergency management has been implemented and tested at Concordia University.