ABSTRACT
One of the big challenges for current asset management is to properly command lifecycle project information to enable asset managers having an integrated view of their engineering assets. During the lifecycle of an infrastructure project, there will produce extremely large amount of information. In the traditional way, the information exchanging and sharing processes are always fragmented. It is general that lifecycle information from different project phases is not efficiently delivered to support asset management works.
This paper tries to find an optimal solution for more integrated asset information management. We start from a brief and state-of-art overview of current information integration approaches for asset management purpose. Three main kinds of approaches are reviewed: (1) BIM and IFC based approach, (2) the Semantic Web based approach and (3) the information retrieval based approach. A comparison between different approaches is then given based on our understanding of the principle of asset information management. Finally, we conclude that an information retrieval tool using artificial intelligence techniques is needed for more integrated asset information management. This paper is a preparation for future developments of a smart information retrieval prototype. The prototype is supposed to be tested on real projects, which will be conducted with collaboration with Rijkswaterstaat (the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment) in the Netherlands.
