Building Information Modelling (BIM) has become an emerging digital technology in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. There is a growing demand on applying BIM for sustainable design including the building energy simulation (BES). Lack of sufficient interoperability has caused barriers to utilize the information from BIM for BES. In this study, the interoperability between BIM and four different BES tools (i.e., Ecotect, EQUEST, Design Builder and IES-VE) was explored by using a case study of a residential building in the design stage. The misrepresented information from BIM to multiple BES tools were identified based on six different categories of building information parameters. The research proposed an approach of creating gbXML file with an improved integrity of information in BIM. Overall, this study would lead to further work in developing platforms for improving the information transformation from BIM to BES.
Urban heat island (UHI) can be described as characteristics of warmth for both the atmospheres and surfaces in cities compared to rural surroundings. The attention on UHI has helped to advance the development of urban cooling strategies in Singapore. However, these strategies are often implemented at different levels with different mechanisms, and studies on the environmental implications of these strategies are often segregated. Therefore, understanding on how the urban canopy works is vital to analyse the energy performance, because canopy modelling is significant in estimating urban weather conditions, which affects the heat gain intake for buildings. It is thus become imperative to develop an integrated model for accurate prediction of weather conditions at different scales. By utilizing the Virtual Singapore (VSg) database, this study explores the development an integrated simulation platform, named BESCAM, for climate assessment and district energy demand. It focuses on urban canopy modelling and building energy simulation. The approach is to use CityGML from VSg as input, which comprises converted Building Information Modelling (BIM) buildings. Then, an urban canopy modelling (UCM) is developed to assess the microclimate condition with urban morphology consideration. Afterwards, building energy simulation can be conducted consecutively using EnergyPlus by integrating microclimate and building information. Hence, the BESCAM platform would offer a unique opportunity to architects, engineers, and scientists to use the same source of information, using VSg database, for conducting their own analysis and compare their conclusions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.