BIM and Automation of Building Operations in Japan: Observations on the State-of-the-Art in Research and Its Orientation

Japan has long-term automation experience in several manufacturing industries. Recently, players of the real estate and building sector have turned strategic attention and research investments to the automation of building operations, aware of the business relevance of the occupancy phase of facilities. This investigation analyzed R&D programs and experimental projects in Japan to foresee the role of BIM in the automation of building operations. A survey of disclosed information helped to understand the trends in automation research with the adoption of digital technologies for immediate and future use. Appliances from electronics manufacturers have been incorporated into complex cyber-physical systems to communicate with the built facility through a BIM-IoT framework. The evolution of ICT has influenced building management systems attributes which require new definitions of the set of data to be delivered and maintained by project players. There is recent evidence of efforts to turn BIM as the platform that creates, manages and also stores information for future BIM-FM uses, even though the integration with BAS/BEMS is not fully solved. Finally, this study identified connections between prior construction automation achievements by Japanese contractors and future orientation related to the technological challenge of context-awareness and servitization.