INTEGRATING BUILDING INFORMATION MODELING AND BUILDING PERFORMANCE SIMULATION

The environmental impact of the Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry is severe. This graduation thesis addresses this phenomenon, and it suggests an approach to influencing architects to take sustainable design decisions optimizing a building’s energy performance. The objective of this thesis was the development of an interactive tool which supports and guides the decision making during the earlier design phases. To achieve this target, the integration of Building Performance Simulation (BPS) and Building Information Modeling (BIM) was considered crucial. The developed tool was based on three basic building blocks. First, it retrieves or creates automatically necessary (spatial, thermal and HVAC) data for the energy assessment from Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) formats. Second, it applies the norms and values found in the Dutch Normative 7120, which assesses, among others, the annual heating and cooling demand of a building. Second, Finally, the information retrieval, and energy assessment is completed with the aid of the Python programming language.
The final assessment, associated with feedback, is included in a user-friendly interface. In essence this feedback shows how each decision making has affected or will affect the energy demand. In that way the architect can evaluate the assessment and the feedback, and he can take optimal design decisions. Thus, the tool supports and guides the decision making. Finally, the entire process is automatic and it does not interrupt the design process. Therefore the tool has promoted a complete integration of BIM and BPS, and it has enabled the possibility of creating an object-oriented sustainable design.