A BIM-BASED WEB SERVICE FRAMEWORK FOR GREEN BUILDING ENERGY SIMULATION AND CODE CHECKING

Green building design has been a major trend in the last decade which has largely affected the AEC industry. As of 2013, for example, there were over 13,000 green buildings certified with LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environment Design) in the United States alone. Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology and computer simulations are adopted largely for green building design. However, while information sharing and automated, collaborative design review are important for the design of green buildings, the current way of BIM-based green building design relies mainly on individual file transfer and does not support collaboration in the distributed environment of construction projects. On the other hand, as the Internet becomes ubiquitous, the web provides convenient and cost-efficient means for multi-location cross-organizational collaboration. Energy analysis and validation against standard building codes are two major processes in green building design evaluation. This paper presents a modular web service based framework which integrates the information necessary for green building design, automates the building design evaluation processes, and facilitates simple updates on the building model on a common but distributed platform. This framework is based on BIM data models like gbXML (Green Building XML) which contain information for green building design like geometry of the building, material, and sensor information from more than one source. The BIM data models act as a single source of building information for all processes. Building design evaluation and updating are iterative in green building design and require information and inputs dispersed among various project participants. Since our framework follows a distributed architecture and is easily accessible from the Internet, it makes the information required to facilitate the iterative process and its results conveniently available to a multi-participant environment. The paper also presents an example scenario demonstrating the developed framework.