E‐maintenance platform design for public infrastructure maintenance based on IFC ontology and Semantic Web services

Summary As an important kind of infrastructure, a tunnel's life is estimated to be 100 years or more. During its service life, an effective maintenance strategy plays an essential role in keeping its availability and safety. Maintenance work involves a set of participants, activities, and resources, and in this case, tunnel‐related data are distributed to heterogeneous information management systems in varying formats, bringing difficulties to implement effective maintenance. This paper proposes an E‐maintenance Framework for Public Infrastructure (EFPI), combining Building Information Modeling (BIM), Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), and Semantic Web technologies to help integrate heterogeneous data and expert knowledge, enable information sharing through the whole life cycle, and support maintenance managers to make effective maintenance decisions. A cost estimation case is provided in this paper to illustrate the implementation mechanism and validate the proposed approach.