A Formal and Ontological Approach to Embed Commissioning Test Protocol into Building Information Model

My dissertation work is in the area of building information modeling (BIM) as applied within the building commissioning (BCx) process. This research develops a formal and ontological approach to embed commissioning test protocols into an embedded commissioning building information model (ECx-BIM). The objective of this research is to reduce manual building information modeling time by providing a just-in-time (JIT) Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) compatible model that includes the product (HVAC) and process model of BCx.;BCx is not a one-time event, but a series of processes that achieve, verify and document the performance of facilities, systems, and assemblies in order to satisfy the owners' project requirements. Since there are many stakeholders involved in the various phases of a building's lifecycle, it is difficult to streamline heterogeneous BCx information seamlessly during the building delivery process.;This problem can be solved by: 1) conducting BCx case studies to better understand the BCx process and identify what kinds of BCx information is used, 2) evaluating the current BIM standard, IFC 2x3 version, to verify how much and how well it can represent the BCx information, 3) developing an ontology to streamline BCx information semantically and reason the relationship between the BCx information, 4) developing an ECx model to derive BIM from a BCx protocol, and 5) evaluating the ECx-BIM in terms of its precision and recall rate of schema parsing and matching.;I found that harnessing dispersed and divergent Cx data is a critical problem in the BCx procedure. Although BIM is used to overcome this problem for better interoperability, the volatile and peculiar natures of the BCx process require a domain expert to analyze BCx protocols written in natural language and manually model the building information for the Cx process.;During the evaluation, I found that the IFC interoperability layer, the IfcSharedBldgServiceElements, can represent the concept of type, occurrence, and performance history of the HVAC system. Moreover, the IFC defined property sets have an advantage to represent a project-specific case. The evaluation shows that the current IFC 2x3 version can represent about 30% of the BCx process. Although the IfcSharedBldgServiceElements and the IFC defined property sets are not fully elaborated to represent every detail in BCx information, its schema has an ideal structure to represent a procedure in the BCx process, for example, model verification, installation checking or functional performance testing.;Based on the findings from the previous two steps, I developed an algorithm to parse building commissioning protocols for HVAC systems written in natural language, and match the parsed BCx items to the IFC 2x3 version by validating against an HVAC ontology. An algorithmic process to product modeling (PPM) method and an ontology based named entity recognition (NER) in natural language processing (NLP) has been implemented to derive and embed product and process models into a BIM.;The proposed ECx-BIM reduces human effort to build the product and process model, and enhances (semi)-automatic building information modeling. The proposed just-in-time strategy derives an as-needed BIM from the specific process description in order to save time and reduce human intervention and the possibility of error.