Multi-Level GIS-Based Data Management Model for Building Maintenance and Repair Data

Abstract

With the increasing cost of new construction projects, keeping the built facilities at acceptable levels of functionality has become a vital and challenging task. This is particularly so for non-residential buildings, such as schools, which are important infrastructure assets that require frequent maintenance and repair of their many components and sub-components. Maintenance and repair jobs, however, involve huge sets of data which contain useful interrelated information about costs, resources, conditions, and productivity. To support decision making at different management levels with respect to the utilization of resources requires the managing, analyzing, and visualizing of these huge amount of data.

This thesis presents a simple and inexpensive approach to managing, reporting, and facilitating the visualization of maintenance and repair data for school buildings. The proposed model conveniently integrates widely used spreadsheet software – MS Excel – and Geographic Information System (GIS) software – MS MapPoint. The spreadsheet’s simple and powerful capability of managing data is exploited to design a data warehouse that can facilitate reporting and visualization. The Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language was used to facilitate the integration between the two software systems and to automate the generation of a variety of reports and maps that can show analysis trends, reveal hidden relationships, and support decision making for different management levels. A real-life case study involving two years of maintenance data for 93 schools at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is used in this thesis to illustrate the development of the model and to demonstrate its simplicity and efficiency. The use of the model as part of an integrated framework for building asset management is also highlighted.