Towards Automated Building Energy Performance Simulation

Based on an extensive exploration of current literature it is apparent that the absence of a wider use of building energy performance (BEP) simulation in renovation projects can be directly attributed to the great manual effort involved in conducting them. Acquiring managing and utilising existing building data is currently of great interest to industry and academia alike given the scale of existing less energy efficient buildings making up a large percentage of the built environment and the potential impact on carbon reduction for the sector as a whole. Capitalising on efficiency gains made possible through the use of the latest digital technologies the research developed a semi-automated workflow to minimise this manual and error prone effort. This Building Information Modeling (BIM) based workflow focused on utilising open format gbXML to enable seamless interoperability of data between BEP thermodynamic simulation tools and a Single Analysis Model (SAM 2.0) intelligently linked to the architectural BIM providing an improved workflow and potentially facilitating the wider adoption of BEP simulation for renovation projects.