Possibilities of BIM-FM for the Management of COVID in Public Buildings

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 49.7 million reported cases and over 1.2 million deaths globally confirmed deaths at the time of writing, demands global action to counteract this virus. It is widely accepted that COVID-19 is a long-term pandemic that will require a constant and innovative range of mitigation approaches to protect public health. This paper provides infrastructure facility management (FM) systems based on Building Information Modeling (BIM) to reduce the likelihood of COVID-19 infections indoors. Although there are several factors for dealing with COVID-19, the sole focus of this project is to reduce crowding and facilitate social distancing between occupants. The significance of this research relies on the use of mathematical methods, BIM, programming as well as FM tools and databases to achieve safer management of large and populated public buildings during the COVID-19 pandemic. The infrastructure management example refers to the Civil Engineering School at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. It is based on mathematical applications to find the paths of people paths inside the infrastructure and is synchronized with in-house developed software and the Internet domain as source and input data.