Green BIM-based building energy performance analysis

In the face of a rapidly changing climate and global energy crisis, this study proposes the concept of green building information modeling (Green BIM), and suggests the use of a decision-making cycle when performing building performance analysis (BPA) to obtain design proposals with optimized environmental effectiveness in response to local climate conditions when BIM is used as a basic tool from the beginning of the design process. Taking building energy performance analysis as an example, in comparison with other domestic and foreign research, the important contributions of the study include: (1) Based on a design decision-making perspective, a Green BIM-based decision-making cycle can integrate the practical steps of BIM and BPA. (2) Furthermore, this study also finds that meteorological data in a format that can be used in BPA is not easy to obtain. Nevertheless, virtual weather station technology developed using cloud technology can enable a building project to obtain simulated meteorological data relying on weather stations closest to the required criteria, and a cloud building energy analysis engine can be used to implement complex analysis involving large amount of data. As a result, the use of green-BIM technology and concepts can be promoted with greater ease. When setting energy conservation targets, this study recommends that building energy usage intensity (EUI) be employed as an integrated performance indicator for energy consumption, and percentage of performance optimization be employed as a rating criterion. Nevertheless, the use of energy conservation targets is not essential; depending on the directions in which national governments would like to lead the industry and the maturity and feasibility of relevant technologies, other feasible high-performance benchmarks proposed in this study may also be used in Green BIM. © 2017 CAD Solutions, LLC.