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PassivBIM: enhancing interoperability between BIM and low energy design software

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-07-16, 08:18 authored by Alexandra Cemesova, Christina Hopfe, Rob McLeod
The process of building design is currently undergoing some major changes. In an attempt to mitigate climate change, the design of more sustainable buildings is advocated by the UK government. Furthermore, standalone design methods are being replaced with the concept of Building Information Modelling (BIM). The adoption of BIM has been documented to result in many benefits, which range from time to cost savings. During the initial planning stages, building performance simulation (BPS) can be used to inform design decisions. Data can be exchanged between BIM and BPS tools using data transfer schemas such as the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). The IFC schema lacks an energy domain, and as a result, an extension is proposed in this paper. This contains energy concepts from a BPS tool called Passive House Planning Package (PHPP). The extended schema was developed by way of an externally coupled Java tool, which facilitates the transfer of data, and informs the building design decision-making process. The process of geometry extraction has been validated with several case studies, which are based on certified Passivhaus buildings in Hannover Kronsberg, Germany and Ebbw Vale, Wales. The amount of error is acceptable, and it is mostly due to differences in the initial BIM model setup, not due to the processing of IFC files.

Funding

The authors would like to thank bere:architects for access to Larch House building data. They would also like to thank the Building Research Establishment and EPSRC for funding the Ph.D of the corresponding author.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Automation in Construction

Volume

57

Pages

17 - 32

Citation

CEMESOVA, A., HOPFE, C.J. and MCLEOD, R.S., 2015. PassivBIM: enhancing interoperability between BIM and low energy design software. Automation in Construction, 57, pp.17-32.

Publisher

© Elsevier B.V.

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2015-04-23

Publication date

2015-05-14

Copyright date

2015

ISSN

0926-5805

Other identifier

S0926580515000989

Language

  • en