Information Interoperability between Building Information Modeling Authoring Tools and Simulation Tools to Support Energy Efficient Building Design

Open Access
- Author:
- Yu, Nan
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 20, 2014
- Committee Members:
- Dinghao Wu, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
John Yen, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
John Messner, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- Information Interoperability
Building Information Modeling (BIM)
Energy Efficient Buildings (EEB)
OpenStudio
Data Exchange - Abstract:
- Effective Energy Efficient Buildings (EEB) design requires the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) design authoring tools, along with various simulation tools to support decision making for optimized building solutions. This requires frequent interactions between computational tools. Traditionally, people have been using a point-to-point model for data exchange between those tools, which is complex and inefficient. An integrated data-centric model can reduce the communication cost and improve the interoperability. By setting up a BIM data hub in the center, both BIM design authoring tools and simulation tools only need to talk with the data hub. In this way, the communication interface among those tools is improved. However, even in this model, each tool still requires an interface to connect to the BIM data hub. If part of those tools have the same kind of interface, and part of them are supported by one single tool, the data exchange model could be further simplified. In this case, the building lifecycle is divided into two modes: design and simulation. The lack of a unified interface to support information exchange and interoperability among different building design and simulation tools has become a bottleneck of the EEB design process. Therefore, a link between design mode and the simulation mode is required for the whole simulation process. In this thesis, two existing infrastructures are leveraged to build a connected workflow using this simplified approach. The open source BIMserver is used as the information retrieval center, and OpenStudio is used as the information exchange and simulation platform. BIMserver can support the storage, maintenance, and query of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) based building information models, and OpenStudio is a platform supporting whole building energy-related modeling and simulations. The main contribution of this thesis is to build an information exchange bridge between BIMserver and OpenStudio, which enables different design authoring tools and simulation tools that are connected to either of them to interoperate and exchange needed data. This thesis describes the integrated approach at the data level, connecting BIMserver and OpenStudio to build a unified EEB data exchange model. The challenges of the seamless integration due to the dependency on both BIMserver and OpenStudio are also discussed in the thesis. The system, which organizes the data flow in a unified model, enabling effective exchange of data, has been open source released.