The Integration between Design and Maintenance of Office Building Automation: A Decision Support Approach

Traditionally, consultants of office building design often do not have sufficient understanding on maintenance issues for the operation of the building. As a result, there is often a lack of effective solutions for service, upgrade and maintenance problems during the life span of the building. For automated and intelligent buildings, with their wide range of technology adaptation and upgrade capacity, this demand and lack of response is more critical. Previous efforts on integrated consideration for building development phases, particularly between design and maintenance are very rare with only a few related topics exploring ideas. This situation presents a great potential for the development at an integrated decision support system for the communication between and integration of design and maintenance phases during the conception stage. This paper reports a research being conducted at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, which aims at raising the awareness of the importance of integration in the building conception process by addressing a practical issue of design for maintenance. Building Automation Systems (BAS) are major elements of modern office buildings and have major influence on building performance and energy conservation. Within these systems, there are substantial design issues to be considered if an optimal level of service and maintenance can be provided. The paper will discuss key elements of the research and its development such as (1) identifying practical problems in relation to building maintenance as a result of poorly designed BAS (2) establishment of a design guide to effectively cater for maintenance issues for building automation systems (3) development of a computer based decision support system for improving the integration and communication between the two key building development phases: design and maintenance.