Formalization of Occupant Feedback and Integration with BIM in Office Buildings

Occupant feedback is not effectively used in the facility management (FM) phase for operations and maintenance activities as well as retrofit and refurbishment investment decisions. One of the reasons is related to incomplete or mostly unstructured occupant feedback data. The goal of this paper is (1) to formalize occupant feedback in office buildings by developing a semantic data model, and (2) to implement the semantic data model in a prototype to demonstrate that capturing and storing occupant feedback and integrating it with building information modeling (BIM) improves the experience of both occupants and FM personnel. Interviews were conducted with office occupants and facility managers, and use cases were created to develop the semantic data model. This data model was implemented in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) schema and a case study was conducted, in which a prototype for collecting occupant feedback integrated with BIM was developed to test the proposed approach. The applicability, practicability, and usability of the system were measured via usability tests that were applied to the occupants and FM team members. The findings showed that the proposed semantic data model can be utilized to store occupant feedback in a structured manner and to integrate this information with BIM-enabled FM systems. This approach facilitates (1) continuous collection of occupant feedback along with the vital contextual information including geometric data, and (2) effective utilization of this information in FM operations by providing visualization and analysis capabilities.