DATA TRANSFER INTEGRITY FROM BUILDING INFORMATION MODEL (BIM) TO BUILDING ENERGY MODEL (BEM)

Abstract

Building energy efficiency issue has been a concern for decades. One of the most efficient ways to address this issue is to integrate energy efficiency modelling into the early building design stage. However, traditional energy modelling methods are getting more and more expensive since they are usually labour-intensive and require repeating data input process. This is especially when buildings are getting larger and more complexed compared to past developments. As a result, BIM-based simulation analysis is becoming more and more desirable though we cannot ignore the interoperability issues which occurred in the process of BIM to BEM data transfer. Data transfer integrity has to be improved so as to get more accurate and precise building energy simulation results. This study aimed to develop with solutions and recommendations that can be adopted to improve the data transfer integrity from BIM to BEM. A building model was created in Autodesk Revit in a case study approach, and the gbXML output data file was generated from both Revit and Green Building Studio (GBS) to be tested in several BEM tools. A comparison of results was also presented at the end of this research. Main findings of this dissertation are: types of data that can be used as input files from BIM to BEM were identified, and level of accuracy and difficulty of different BEM tools were concluded.