Occupant Feedback and Context Awareness: On the Application of Building Information Modeling and Semantic Technologies for Improved Complaint Management in Commercial Buildings

Common methods for submitting hardware- or comfort-related complaints in an office or industrial environment, such as online forms or via a telephone hotline, can lead to misinterpretations of the issue and/or be perceived as being cumbersome by the submitter. This can act as a barrier for the submission of feedback and thus cause the facility management to remain unaware of unsatisfactory comfort conditions or faults, which can result in further issues and costs. In order to reduce the submission effort, a novel software-based solution is proposed, which automatically determines the most probable complaints, suggests them to the user and, when possible, automatically solves them. This is achieved by employing detailed context information stemming from a Building Information Model, the Building Automation System and past complaints submitted by the occupants. This information is integrated and represented with semantic technologies, which allow to formally organize the information and describe the relationships between the data. The solution was implemented as an app and was demonstrated in a real office environment. The reduced effort of submitting feedback via the app led to a strong increase in the submission of comfort-related complaints, showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution.