Defining a taxonomy for virtual 3D city model use cases with a focus on facility asset management - A virtual campus case study

Maintaining facilities and the assets within the facilities is a critical task for large institutional owners. Many owners leverage computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) to store, manage and query data related to their assets and work orders focused on maintaining the depreciating assets. Many CMMS applications have limited functionality to visualize this data relative to geographic and other spatial information. CMMS data can be associated with geospatial information to enable additional planning tasks related to location requirements. Recent advances in reality modeling allow us to quickly generate a highly detailed, geospatially accurate 3D digital model of a large area with multiple buildings at a low cost by leveraging digital images. This research first developed taxonomy of virtual 3D city model use cases in diverse domains. Then the value of visualizing facility asset information in a virtual 3D city model was explored. A case study was implemented through the creation of a large-scale 3D reality mesh of the University Park Campus at Penn State. A framework to integrate facility asset data with the reality mesh was developed. The taxonomy provided a better understanding of the scope of applications that virtual 3D city models can offer for model users. Integrating the reality mesh with CMMS data allowed for the demonstration of better visualization of maintenance scheduling decisions, along with improved maintenance personnel distribution.