Situational Awareness in Construction and Facility Management

Engineers and managers involved in construction and facility/infrastructure operations need situational awareness about the as-is conditions when making daily decisions and developing short- and long-term plans. Yet, currently situational awareness of engineers is often challenged due to missing data and the available data not being in a format that is easily accessible and actionable. Advances in reality capture technologies, such as 3-dimensional (3D) imaging, in-situ sensing, equipment on-board instrumentation and electronic tagging, streamline the capturing of the as-is conditions on job sites. The data collected from these technologies, integrated with building information models depicting the as-planned conditions, can help in creating and storing the history of as-is conditions of a facility to support a variety of decisions that engineers and managers need to make. While the opportunities associated with integrating building information models and data capture technologies are compelling, several challenges need to be addressed through research for effective usage of these technologies. Such challenges include assessing the accuracy of the data collected at the field, developing and evaluating data processing and data fusion approaches, formalizing integrated representation of building information models and sensor and other relevant data, and investigating and developing approaches for analyzing and visualizing such integrated information models. This paper provides examples of recent research studies done at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University that demonstrate opportunities associated with integrating building information models and sensor information for facility operations.