Creating a BIM for Emergency Management

The industry (software vendors, architects, builders) tends to think of a BIM as the 3D epresentation created from 2D Computer Assisted Drawings (CADD) files or by a specialized BIM application. Facility owners and operators, however, are beginning to realize a BIM only begins with that 3D representation; it reaches far beyond that to incorporate all of the facility-associated data including (but certainly not limited to) as-builts, equipment pecifications and operations manuals, parts lists, data from the building automation and ontrol systems, and fire response plans. Those owners and operators realize that having all of this information in electronic format that can be integrated and correlated would provide the basis for their lifecycle BIM and provide the basis for real time data for a decision support system that can be used for a wide variety of scenarios and applications.