BIM-RFID Technology for Facility Management in Power Systems

Abstract

Currently, there is a lack of a practical and straightforward method to accomplish concealed facility positioning and maintenance work in power systems, such as a substation or power plant. On the one hand, it is hard to find the accurate location of a specific device that is on the ceiling or underground in the Operation and Maintenance (O&M) phase. Another challenge is to provide useful information for facility maintenance workers and to bring a visible location image for them on the site. In this paper, Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies are used to solve facility positioning and maintenance issues in power systems. First, the facility position can be determined by comparing the real RFID tag location with the virtual RFID tag location. Moreover, the target-related facility information for the maintenance work can be acquired by BIM models. Lastly, the live view of the specific location of a concealed equipment can be shown on a mobile terminal on the site by using a simple Augmented Reality (AR) technique. This paper, containing a substation case study, demonstrated that the BIM-RFID technology could achieve precise positioning, efficiency improvements, and re-visit times and costs reduction in power systems.