PAVING THE WAY FOR EXHAUSTIVE AND SEAMLESS BIM- BASED BUILDING ENERGY SIMULATION

This paper presents an on-going work, which aims at improving the support for BIM-based energy simulation. The contribution is twofold. Firstly, a discussion about BIM-based energy simulation is provided, with an in-depth review of the state-of-the-art and a synthetic highlighting of the main related research issues, i.e. provision of an extensive IFC toolkit to perform the various translations and to make the link with BIM-based collaborative work support; validation of IFC models (completeness and correctness) and translation into the data formats used by the simulation tools; enrichment of IFC to enable exhaustive description of building elements and HVAC systems; user interfaces and usability. Then, the paper focuses on the issue of HVAC systems BIM descriptions and gives the result of a study performed on the capabilities of the IFC in this matter. This study entailed reviewing the properties and parameters needed to describe HVAC systems in a representative selection of simulation environments, and proposing ways to describe accordingly the systems in IFC (relying on proper enrichment of native IFC constructs). From these two contributions, the paper draws conclusions about the limitations of current support, and about the directions to take to fully enable BIM-based energy simulations.