From BIM to CIM to innovate Life Cycle Management of Entire Works and Their Parts

During the last few years, many efforts have been made to promote the widespread use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and to exploit its potentialities. Despite several important activities at international level aimed at creating standards, free tools and open languages for interoperability, the BIM approach has mainly brought enhancements to software for 3D renderings which now are able to represent complex models where information is directly associated to each object constituting the model itself. However, the exchange of information among different stakeholders has not improved significantly, most of all because real interoperability among software has not been achieved and because data sharing has to be independent of specific commercial software. Along different life cycle stages, asset and facility management represents a very interesting field for the application of BIM strengths because it needs to store and use much information about the behaviour over time of different building materials, products and components. Moreover, because at international level (for instance, CIB W080 Commission is still working hard on this aspect) the lack of reliable tools for service life planning and data capitalisation from facility management is evident. It is then necessary to develop some methods for Service Life Planning and Management, to be easily integrated by maintenance data and used during the design of facility and maintenance activities. Therefore, only the development of specific Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools for life cycle data use and sharing based on Industrial Foundation Classes (IFC) standards of the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) can actually enable exploiting BIM potentialities along the entire building process. The paper presents a number of activities undertaken in the last few years by Politecnico di Milano in order to move from a BIM approach (where the modelling is central) to a Construction Information Management (CIM) system capable of allowing an effective integration and exploitation of building process data along the entire life cycle of construction works and their parts.