CHALLENGES OF EXPORTING AN IFC FILE TO INTEGRATE THE ENERGY SIMULATION ANALYSIS WORKFLOW

Abstract

The energy evaluation process of a building is usually made through computer simulation. Most software used in this application operate in an isolated manner, being common the need of rework on modeling the building with basic geometries in such a way that the computer application can generate the energy analysis report. To avoid this time-consuming and error-prone process, there has been a steady progress through the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) to reduce rework and improve interoperability issues. This research had the primary objective of studying the process of exporting a virtual building information model to run an energy analysis in a different platform software, confronting with the traditional method which is based in remodeling the building in basic geometric forms. The research also aimed at studying issues occurred during this process and proposes actions to mitigate them. In order to do so, a popular home building project was used to simulate and run the analysis comparing conventional with innovative method. After going through the steps of exporting a virtual building information model and run an energy analysis in a different platform software, many issues were observed highlighting the need of improvement. These problems occurred in different steps within the workflow, from failing to export the data in IFC to extracting all needed data that were in the IFC file, leaving no doubts regarding opportunities of research and development in this area.