Linking life cycle BIM data to a facility management system using Revit Dynamo

Abstract

Facility management (FM) requires multidisciplinary activities, and thus has extensive information requirements. Much of that information is created during the design, construction, and commissioning phases of a project. Providing the owner of a facility with usable life cycle asset information after construction has been a challenge to the industry. Traditional methods of manually inputting data into FM systems are time consuming and error prone. Various automated approaches and workflows continue to be developed to respond to specific owner needs. This research developed a unique workflow that uses Dynamo within Revit to automatically extract asset management data from the model and export the data to a proprietary format required by the facility owner. The formatted spreadsheet allows for direct linking of the data to the owner's FM system, hence eliminating time wasted in manual data entry and avoiding missing any maintenance cycles that would result if the FM system is not populated with critical information in a timely manner. This article utilizes a case study approach to demonstrate this novel Dynamo workflow. The required case study asset data identified and captured include asset groups, their properties and attributes, and corresponding metadata. A basic three-dimensional representation of the facility and all its equipment are modeled in Revit and asset data are input to corresponding model elements. This article also describes the complexity of the owner's proprietary information needs and the resulting automated workflow that extracts and exports data from Revit into an Excel format that can directly link into the FM system.

Keywords

• facility management
• bim
• life cycle
• dynamo
• data