Envelope thermal performance analysis based on building information model (BIM) cloud platform - Proposed green mark collaboration environment

Abstract

Building Information Modeling (BIM) and sustainable buildings are two future cornerstones of the Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. In Singapore's context, the Green Mark (GM) scoring system is prevalently used to assess the sustainability index of green buildings. BIM provides the semantic and geometry information of buildings, which is proliferated as the technological and process backbone for the green building assessment. This research, through vast literature reviews, identified that the current procedure of achieving a Green Mark score is tedious and cumbersome, which hampers productivity, especially in the calculation of building envelope thermal performance. Furthermore, the project stakeholders work in silos, in a non-collaborative, manual and 2D-based environment for generating relevant documentation to achieve the requisite green mark score. To this end, a cloud-based BIM platform was developed, with the aim of encouraging project stakeholders to collaboratively generate the project's green mark score digitally in accordance with the regulatory requirements. Through this research, the authors have validated the Envelope Thermal Transfer Value (ETTV) calculation, which is one of the prerequisite criteria to achieve a Green Mark score, through a case study using the developed cloud-based BIM platform. The results indicated that using the proposed platform enhances the productivity and accuracy as far as ETTV calculation is concerned. This study provides a basis for future research in implementing the proposed platform for other criteria under the Green Mark Scheme. © 2020 by the authors.