Interoperable mixed reality for facility management: a cyber-physical perspective

The management of building commissioning requires specialists from different organizations and with different skills. Collaboration processes involves several actors and decision-making at different levels. As building commissioning has already been described as systems-of-systems (SoS), the research reported in this paper claims that this definition can be extended into cyber-physical system-of-systems (CPSoS), requiring identification and support of both human-machine and machine-machine interactions in a hybrid environment. These requirements give rise to several challenges, such as capturing information about the existing facility, visualizing, comparing, and validating the compliance of alternative commissioning projects. The study presented in this paper reports methodological and technological solutions that are built on the integration between BIM and mixed reality, to actualize a CPSoS paradigm and to implement human-machine interaction for situated cognition towards an immersive collaborative working environment. The results of the experimental platform have been showcased in a full-scale real-life demonstrator.