Interoperability between Building Design and Building Energy Analysis

Lack of interoperability has been criticized as an impediment to improving productivity in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. For example, the current information exchange between building design and energy analysis models has numerous issues, including object parametric information deficiencies, geometric misrepresentations and re-input data confusion. As a result, it leads to huge money, time and effort losses in practice. The objective of this paper is to present an automated solution for the seamless information exchange between building design and energy analysis models. In order to achieve this objective, a file converter is designed. The file format converter is built upon existing open standards (gbXML and DOE-2 input files) which facilitate the exchange of building design and energy analysis information. Designers could use the converter to properly analyze building energy efficiency for their design models. Also, the design models could be automatically updated if any modifications have been made in the corresponding energy analysis models. The converter has been implemented with Microsoft Visual C# Studio 2013 and its effectiveness has been tested with two popular design and energy analysis tools - Autodesk®-based products and eQUEST®. In addition, the creation of a software plug-in component has also been proposed in order to execute the file converter application. The results have demonstrated the overall rectification of the geometric and material misrepresentations resulting from the current software interoperability process.