By Robina Hetherington, Robin Laney and Stephen Peake (The Open University)
Abstract: The need to reduce the energy used by buildings and the resultant carbon emissions is changing how they are designed, look and work. This position paper outlines the urgent need for new software that integrates thermal simulation with building information modelling. A vision for the software is presented.
Advertisement
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
May 17, 2011 at 12:49 am
Jorge Aranda
This paper presents a vision to merge two kinds modeling tools (thermal simulation and building information modeling) to enable architects to design energy efficient buildings more easily. I liked the vision, and the paper is fairly accessible to architecture laypeople like myself. I wish the authors had clarified the requirements that they elicited from architecture students in greater detail, as well as the methods to elicit them, as their techniques (and potential ways to improve them) would also be of interest for this workshop.
May 31, 2011 at 10:22 am
Robina Hetherington
Thank you for your positive comments. The call for contributions for the workshop asked for a description of the project and a brief paper, with a limit of 4 pages, so detail was not included. Depending upon the time given for presentations I will be happy to give more detail of the requirements at the workshop. The elicitation of requirements was use to help scope and direct the project and may not be considered as novel in RE terms. However, I would be grateful for any suggestions of where the detail of the requirements could be published.
May 19, 2011 at 5:46 pm
Elena Pérez-Miñana
the research proposal is interesting, and although the authors are correct in highlighting the need for better interfaces between the different components that are needed when attempting the design of a building using a software tool(s), it is also the case that some of the tools have achieved a reasonable level of interaction. For example, IES/VE allows you to indicate the materials that you intend to use in your construction, and it computes useful information such as the U value which gives an initial estimate of the heat transmission in various parts of the building. Another element that is very important and maybe worth considering is the integration of “post-occupancy” information which can be used in future designs.
May 31, 2011 at 10:24 am
Robina Hetherington
Thank you for your feedback. Currently I am looking at interoperable standards used in the AEC industry after that I plan to look at visualization of data. This will include a review of interaction and display of data produced by a selection of energy simulation packages, of which IES/VE will be one. However, these packages are intended for use by energy experts and not by building designers. With the imminent tightening of building regulations as a response to the urgent treat of climate change architects will need to carry out more simulations themselves and that is where the vision comes from – to combine the process of building design and thermal simulation into one tool. Yes, post-occupancy is very important, but beyond the scope of this project.
June 7, 2011 at 2:36 pm
Steffen Zschaler
Certainly an interesting paper on a topic of relevance to the workshop. The argumentation is very much from the perspective of architecture. It would also have been very interesting to get a better understanding of the software-engineering challenges in this: Specifically what are the biggest challenges in integrating these models? There seems to be an HCI challenge in making these additional information available to architects in a usable format, what is it?
In the area of model-driven development, there has been substantial work on using transformations to automatically derive analysis models from design models (of software) as well as attempting to translate analysis results back into design-model terms. This seems related to the work presented in this paper.