Towards an Ontological Approach for the Integration of Information on Operation and Maintenance in BIM for Road Infrastructure.

Building information modeling (BIM) is a new process to manage the full lifecycle of a construction project. For road infrastructure, the operation and maintenance (O&M) phase has major importance as it secures its sustainability. However, this phase is not satisfactorily integrated into the BIM process. This limitation emerges from two predominant factors: First, the current industry foundation classes (IFC) standard does not yet support objects related to infrastructure. Second, the information applied to the O&M phase, represented in the IFC, does not allow complete management of this phase. This research paper aims to propose an ontological approach, called IFCInfra4OM, to integrate O&M information in BIM for road infrastructure. In addition, it features the importance and requirements of O&M in road infrastructure and proposes the ontological approach to integrate these requirements within the IFC schema. For this purpose, the methodological diagram is presented. Its steps outline how the analysis of existing international standards is necessary for better integration of BIM into the road infrastructure domain. The proposed methodology develops the criteria to be considered for such an objective. Finally, the scientific contribution of the research is presented in the light of the prevailing field literature. Furthermore, future works for building IFCInfra4OM are submitted.