A Virtual Collaborative Platform to Support Building Information Modeling Implementation for Energy Efficiency

There is increased interest in complying with the new regulations and policies associated with the climate change. In particular industries such as the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) industry seek to find new strategies and practices for facilitating sustainability but also new regulations to improve efficiency at the building level. Institutions and industrial bodies are now in the process of alignment with new legislative stipulations regarding carbon emissions with wider reflection into environment, social and economic models. At building level such strategies refer to decarbonisation and energy efficiency supported with data driven techniques enriched with virtual collaboration and optimization methods. The increased interest of the research community in Building Information Modeling (BIM) has facilitated numerous solutions ranging from digital products, information retrieval, and optimization techniques all aiming at addressing energy optimization and performance gap reduction. In this paper we present how a virtual collaborative system can be efficiently used for implementing BIM based energy optimization for controlling, monitoring buildings and running energy optimization, greatly contributing to creating a BIM construction community with energy practices. The solution described, known as energy-bim.com platform, disseminates energy efficient practices and community engagement and provides support for building managers in implementing energy efficient optimization plans.