Information Governance and Traceability across the Project and Asset Lifecycle in BIM: Integrating Requirements, Delivery, Assurance, Acceptance, and Information-State Transitions

This working paper presents Version 1.3 of the Information Governance and Traceability across the Project and Asset Lifecycle in BIM study and develops the Lifecycle Information Governance and Traceability Model (LIGTM) as a configurable management-level model for BIM information governance across the project and asset lifecycle. Version 1.3 substantially develops the earlier lifecycle-based BIM information delivery and responsibility model. The study moves beyond using a lifecycle matrix primarily to organize information requirements, deliverables, stakeholder responsibilities, and milestones and develops an explicit governance and traceability architecture connecting decision and information needs with information requirements, planned production and exchange, governance responsibilities, verification, authorization, acceptance, information-state transitions, downstream lifecycle use, and controlled-change reassessment. The paper introduces the Information Governance Assurance Trace (IGAT) as a bounded management-level representation of the applicable governance relationships associated with a selected information need. IGAT is intended to make these governance paths explicit and structurally inspectable while maintaining distinctions among trace presence, structural completeness, information conformity, authorization, acceptance, lifecycle information state, downstream use, and empirical effectiveness. The baseline forty-one-item lifecycle register is retained but reclassified as a heterogeneous and configurable reference artifact register rather than as a homogeneous set of BIM deliverables. LIGTM further distinguishes requirement, reference-artifact, actual information-container, and trace identities and separates production responsibility from verification, authorization, acceptance, and information-state governance functions. The contribution is deliberately positioned as integrative and configurational rather than as the invention of generic traceability mechanisms. Established mechanisms from ISO 19650 and prior BIM, information management, requirements engineering, semantic, lifecycle, and CDE-based assurance research are treated as foundations and comparators. The paper does not claim originality for generic requirements traceability, lifecycle information exchange, responsibility mapping, semantic relationships, automated compliance checking, quality gates, verification, authorization, acceptance, PIM–AIM continuity, or change-impact reasoning individually. The residual contribution concerns their proposed management-level configuration within LIGTM and IGAT and the associated structural inspection and falsification logic. Internal structural validation is conducted using deliberately constructed positive, negative, contradictory, and unresolved fixtures. The expanded controlled validation comprises nine constructed outcomes and exercises all six proposed orphan classes covering requirement, artifact, acceptance, information-state, downstream-use, and authority conditions. These tests demonstrate the logical executability and discrimination of the proposed structural rules only under controlled conditions. The validation does not establish empirical effectiveness, independent reproducibility, inter-rater reliability, comparative superiority, improved project or asset performance, or whole-model conformity with ISO 19650. External project-based validation using controlled project evidence and independent assessors remains the next research phase. Version relationship: Version 1.3 is a substantive revision and continuation of the previously released Working Paper Version 1.2. The previous version remains part of the research record as an earlier stage in the development of the model. Previous version (v1.2): DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22666941Current version (v1.3): DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23069591