Data formating and visualization of BIM and sensor data in building management systems

Building sensor data is getting increasingly more significant for our goal to find effective ways of operating and maintaining buildings. Development in the Internet of Things (IoT) brings us numerous and more connected methods of data acquisition. There has been an interest in using Building Information Modelling’s (BIM) advantages in enhancing the management, analysis and visualization of operational building data in contemporary Building Management Systems (BMS). With the emergence of Smart Building technologies, which provides us with larger and more complex data about building systems’ performance, there is a need to understand and address the challenges, BIM and BMS face in the successful handling and analysis of large and dynamic sensor data. In this paper, we investigate how universal data formatting can contribute to the faster, easier and more practical management of BIM and sensor data. Since BIM is designed to act as an organized database for design and construction information, our investigation aims to use the built-in BIM ontology to organize the sensor data. We propose a data handling framework, involving data conversion and mapping algorithms, to format and link the different datasets into simple and easy-to-read data objects. We have then developed a prototype, demonstrating the BIM and sensor database management and linkage, and subjected the newly formatted data to a simulated BMS environment, that analyses and visualizes the BIM-enhanced and highly dynamic sensor record data.