Integrated systems for maintenance management

The research presented is entitled Integrated System for Maintenance Management. It explores the intersection of two topic areas: Information Technology (IT), which is providing significant improvement to business practices throughout many industries, and Facilities Management (FM), which is dealing primarily with sustainability of capital investments.

The research recognizes the fragmentation in the practice of FM, and proposes a framework that aims at being a systematic and generic reference to the practice of maintenance management. The framework served to identify avenues throughout the practice of maintenance management where strategies and procedures could be implemented to improve operations and increase efficiencies. The framework is proposed to standardize business processes description, the activities that need to be undertaken and the methodology of how and what information needs to be communicated between processes.

The dissertation focuses on integrating data and knowledge through the development of shared project models that maintain a combination of product and process views of the project. Development of these models followed a methodology similar to that of the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) to develop data standards in the form of Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs). The research, while examining the existing IFCs within the available releases of the IFC model, recommends a set of extensions to the model to be included in future releases.

The research explores the implementation of these models through the development of an Asset Management Tool prototype integrated application, as a proof-of-concept for implementing the view of generic asset management in a distributed, model-based, integrated systems architectures environment named Jigsaw Distributed System. An interface for representing the hierarchical breakdown of project information was developed and tested. The Interface enables users to relate multiple kinds and sources of information and initiate data exchanges with other desktop software applications, hence demonstrating software interoperability, which in turn reduces dependency on paper-based views of project information.

The resulting contributions to the research have demonstrated that a distributed, model-based approach to systems integration is feasible in the FM domain and that resulting applications hold the promise of exhibiting flexibility and significant integration.