From Smart Construction Objects to Cognitive Facility Management

Abstract

The Architecture, Engineering, construction, and operation (AECO) industry has been strenuously exploring smart technologies to solve its many chronic problems. Smart construction object (SCO) is proposed as a step towards ubiquitous computing and smartness in the construction context. SCOs are defined as construction resources made ‘smart’ by augmenting them with awareness, communicativeness, and autonomy. SCOs will lead to a new paradigm of smart construction. In the meantime, cognitive facility management (FM) is proposed as a step towards active intelligence of FM. It can perceive through cognitive systems, learn in the manner of human cognition with the power of cognitive computing to improve the quality of people’s life and productivity of core business. The design of cognitive FM is to apply CIoT to FM with the consideration of integrating its cyber, physical, social systems (i.e., cyber-physical-social system, CPSS). In this chapter, a framework of cognitive FM is introduced, with eight layers, namely, environment, perception, data, communication, computation, application, action, and evaluation layer. It is important to integrate construction and FM in a loop to achieve information continuity, information credibility, life-cycle management continuity, as a way to alleviate the AECO industry’s chronic problems. The integration is proposed between SCO and cognitive FM. SCO can serve as a hardware foundation and software interface of sensing and computing to achieve awareness, communicativeness, and autonomy. Cognitive FM, in turn, will be a platform for the implementation of SCOs. With the awareness, communicativeness, and autonomy of SCOs as a backbone, the perception, learning, and action of cognitive FM system will be better achieved. Two scenarios, proactive structure assessment and life-cycle MEP system monitoring, are proposed and explained to validate the integrated framework of SCO and cognitive FM.