BIM methodology for operation and maintenance

Spain

The BIM methodology makes it possible to receive a large amount of information from all stakeholders involved in the life cycle of infrastructures and industrial plants during the operation and maintenance phase. Among other benefits, BIM design provides a granular 3D model at the level of equipment, systems and sites, with valuable information for plant maintenance teams: references, locations, metadata and various documents. In plants with thousands of pieces of equipment, this information is of great value to the maintenance teams working on the new infrastructure in operation.

In this case, the client’s need is to integrate the BIM models with the SAP maintenance system on which they maintain their facilities, thus enabling a semi-automated, error-free and immediate bidirectional integrated information model. In this way, the bidirectional integration of the BIM sources (Autodesk Revit) and the SAP maintenance system, allows:

• Immediate integration of two sources of information (engineering and maintenance) managed by different teams of people.
• Establishment of a central ‘Common Data Environment’, where information is validated and integrated from different sources.
• SAP Asset Management central platform, which incorporates new functionalities in the maintenance management of its facilities: monitoring, predictive maintenance models via IoT+IA, etc.

The IDOM team, which is expert in BIM methodology and tools as well as in SAP and plant maintenance processes, proposed a BIM Digital Twin integration project with SAP Asset Management for a certain number of assets. The main activities of the project were:

• Definition of the BIM ontology, which defines a BIM information ‘template’ aligned with the structuring of information in SAP.
• Architecture in SAP cloud, on which the information coming from the AutoDesk environment is imported and exploited.
• Design and implementation of the plant import process, based on equipment typology models.
• Analysis of processes and functionalities of ‘SAP Asset Management’, including visualization and tracking ‘mobile’ on augmented reality technology.
• Design, development and implementation of the information synchronization interface from SAP to Autodesk Revit.

With the project successfully completed, the IDOM team was able to develop a three-step methodology for integrating digital twins into SAP:

• 360º integration of BIM digital twins in SAP.
• Incorporation of IoT sensors to the equipment.
• Holistic maintenance model based on predictive algorithms.

Digital transformation : Digital Twin