Building information modeling (BIM) - Based design of energy efficient buildings

With the increased awareness of energy consumption as well as the environmental impact of building operations, architects, designers and planners are required to place more consideration on sustainability and energy performance of the building. To ensure most of those considerations are reflected in the building performance, critical design decisions should be made by key stakeholders early during the design development stage. The application of BIM during building energy simulations has profoundly improved the energy analysis process and thus this approach has gained momentum. However, despite rapid advances in BIM-based processes, the question still remains how ordinary building stakeholders can perform energy performance analysis, which has previously been conducted predominantly by professionals, to maximize energy efficient building performance. To address this issue, we identified two leading building performance analysis software programs, Energy Plus and IES <Virtual Environment> and compared their effectiveness and suitability as BIM-based energy simulation tools. To facilitate this study, we examined a case study on Building Performance Model (BPM) of a single story building with one door, multiple windows on each wall, a slab and a roof. We focused particularly on building energy performance by differing building orientation and window sizes and compared how effectively these two software programs analyzed the performance. We also looked at typical decision-making processes implementing building energy simulation program during the early design stages in the U.S. Finally, conclusions were drawn as to how to conduct BIM-based building energy performance evaluations more efficiently. Suggestions for further avenues of research are also made.