ISO 15686-4:2014 provides information and guidance on the use of standards for information exchange for service life planning of buildings and constructed assets and their components as well as the required supporting data.

It provides guidance on structuring information from existing data sources to enable delivery of their information content in a structure that conforms to international standards for information exchange. In particular, reference is made to ISO 16739. The Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie) standard for the exchange of facility information in tabular data are used as an alternative representation. COBie is a tabular representation of a handover view of the IFC schema.

ISO 15686-4:2014 is also applicable to the exchange of service life information between categories of design and information management software applications that have standards-based information exchange interfaces including:

a) Building construction Information Modelling (BIM);

b) Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM).