Integrating augmented reality into building information modeling for facility management case studies

The management of complex information flow can be a crucial aspect of Facility Management (FM). Because of the increasing complexity of the present-day building projects, FM activities, for example, maintaining a building facility or a system, normally involve enormous human multitasking across different knowledge domains. Lessons learned from the present successful FM instances manifest that the FM teams are increasingly interested in applying more viable technologies to achieve the effective management of massive information. Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology is one of the promising approaches, as it forms a platform for the users to manage the information of a facility and leverages virtual digital representations as a reliable basis for decisions during its life-cycle. Nevertheless, the fully immersive environments produced by BIM still lack the capability of mapping a virtual world into a real world, or vice versa. Augmented Reality (AR) is emerging as an advanced visualization which is possible to bridge the gap. It enables the demonstration of BIM context into the real world, and is envisaged to effectively improve the way of how information is displayed. Meanwhile, the virtuality-to-reality changeover from BIM to AR is conductive to a better understanding of information about a facility from the human perception perspective. The objective of the study is to explore that the merging of AR with BIM is a way for improving the information search and management in FM applications. This chapter firstly brief what is FM and how it is generally implemented. Followed by the state-of-the-art review of BIM/AR aided FM research, the chapter then proposes the viability of integrating BIM and AR and demonstrates its efficacy of processing complex onsite information based on four BIM+AR case studies. Finally, the chapter discusses the technological transferability issues in terms of deploying more and more BIM+AR scenarios in the prospective FM process.