Decision making in building maintenance using a graph-based knowledge representation

This paper is an attempt to support effective decision making in building management by assisting maintenance processes. Knowledge about buildings is stored in a graph with many hierarchies. This representation allows us to express different types of hierarchical dependencies between building parts, like geometrical and functional ones, in one structure. Moreover, such a structure is useful to extract subgraphs containing information necessary for a given computational task, such as locating a desired place and the shortest path leading to it. As maintanance processes often require dynamic path target selection, modified indoor navigation methods are proposed. The paper presents the capability of the described knowledge model to cope with complex queries referring to different types of information. The considered examples show that the proposed approach can be used for various facility maintenance management applications.