An-Najah Staff

This paper describes a framework for modeling interdependencies between different network systems and building structures. It provides an approach for the integrated analysis of interior building utilities by describing a framework to model and simulate infrastructure interdependencies and their complex behaviors. It is a graph-based spatial model that can support use cases such as providing the location and specifications of interior utilities to a technician who wants to perform a maintenance operation. This location could be needed for maintenance or replacement, or to investigate the result of damage to the building structure on another utility network, or to estimate the effect of different maintenance operations in different locations along utilities service systems. The model accounts for two important aspects: first, the relationship between interior utilities and building elements or spaces and second, the building hierarchy structure to which the utilities network is related. A proper hierarchy of the building is developed which supports the generation of human-oriented descriptions of interior utilities, where a method for partitions of large building element and spaces as well as a method to reference a network element to another building are developed. The connection of the different utilities network systems and buildings are generated using joints, which are based on a containment relation. An example is presented which shows the effectiveness of this approach for supporting maintenance operations, as well as the independences between the maintenance operation location and the other network systems. The paper presents the data model and explains the links with current 3D building model standards.