Joint R&D 2022: Predictive maintenance: bridging the gap between BMS & operations for more sustainable buildings

Building management and maintenance are important tasks, both for the comfort of the building users and for the energy-efficiency and sustainability of the building itself. Lately, the market of Facility Management (FM) has been changing significantly: integrated, smart and sustainable maintenance of buildings and its installations is becoming very important. Predictive maintenance will be one of the game changers in the next few years. However, it is challenging to achieve this, because of many factors: predicting when a failure will happen is difficult, remotely detecting failure or pre-failure states is often impossible, and persuading the building owner to spend money on fixing what is not broken is challenging as well. In this project, the consortium of project partners, consisting of Buildwise, VMA be.Maintenance and VUB AI Lab, is endeavoring to tackle the challenges and put predictive maintenance into practice. The project focuses on bridging the gap between Building Management Systems (BMS) and maintenance operations, and optimizing the maintenance, with the objective to create buildings that are (and stay) sustainable over their whole lifespan. From a ‘cooperative’ perspective, the objective is to analyse the value of the different types of data related to maintenance of buildings & installations, examine & develop AI-based solutions for existing issues in maintenance & operations of buildings & installations. Based on this, VMA be.Maintenance will further develop & optimize its datahub and the connections with the FM software and integrate AI-based solutions, developed by VUB AI Lab, that help in taking the step towards predictive maintenance. From a sector wide perspective, mapping of the different types of building usage & installation performance data, combined with analysis on how available data can create value and on AI-based solutions for maintenance, will make it possible for other players to invest in a data-driven strategy and help them develop services throughout the life cycle of a building.