Development of a building data model for a performance based optimization environment

Abstract

The present work reports on a specific effort (building model development) within the ongoing research and development project:<br />SEMERGY. Funded under the FFG Research Studio Austrian Programme by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth (BMWFJ), the SEMERGY project is geared toward the development of a decision making environment for performance-guided building design and retrofit. In order to explore the potential of performance assessment tools to support designers in making informed decisions regarding selection of building products, different design alternatives have to be tested and ranked in view of their environmental foot print, investment costs and energy performance. An extensive multi-objective optimization procedure requires a dynamic representation of the building, which includes all necessary data for the underlying calculation engines. This study explores the capacities and deficiencies of some existing building representations, (the Industry Foundation Classes, Green Building XML and Shared Object Model for SEMPER), in view of the specific requirements of SEMERGY environment and reports on the development of "SEMERGY Building Model" (SBM). SBM is a comprehensive building representation, tailored to meet the requirements of both advanced energy simulation procedures and normative calculation routines for most common performance inquiries. Due to its object-based structure, it can be extended for further functionalities with minimal effort. It enables efficient iterations within the optimization process and allows for data entry simplification to reduce calculation time and user effort.<br />This building representation is still under development as the functionalities of the SEMERGY environment expand by integration of new computational routines such as cost estimation.<br />