Smart Facility Management

Abstract

Buildings and public infrastructures are crucial to our societies as they provide habitations, workplaces, commodities and services indispensable to our daily life. As vital parts of facility management, operations and maintenance (O&M) ensure a facility to continuously function as intended, which take up the longest time in a facility’s life cycle and demand great expense. Therefore, computers and information technology have been actively adopted to automate traditional maintenance methods and processes, making O&M faster, more reliable and cheaper in many ways. Augmented reality (AR) offers a new approach towards human-computer interaction through directly displaying information related to real objects that people currently perceive. People’s sensory perceptions are enhanced (augmented) with information of interest naturally without deliberately turning to computers but instead using a mobile and portable device like tablets, mobile phones or a VR headset. Hence, AR has been proved to be able to further improve O&M task performance. The research motif of this thesis is user evaluations of AR applications in the context of facility maintenance. The studies look into invisible target designation tasks assisted by developed AR tools in both indoor and outdoor scenarios. A 2d barcode based positioning system was made and synchronized with the digital data so that it can be juxtaposed in real-time.