Interfacing BIM with Building Thermal and Daylighting Modeling

This paper presents our research and development of system interfaces between Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Building Energy Modeling (BEM), for supporting integrated architectural design and energy simulation. Our methods utilize the BIM authoring tools’ Application Programming Interface (API) to translate BIM into Object-Oriented Physical Models (in Modelica) for building thermal simulation, and input files of ray-tracing software (Radiance) for daylighting simulation. Based on the methods, we have created two prototypes: Revit2Modelica and Revit2Radiance. Using these prototypes, when BIM (Revit models) are created for building design, multi-domain simulations (thermal and daylighting) can be conducted immediately. BIM becomes a common user interface for architectural design and building performance simulations.