Building information model based energy/exergy performance assessment in early design stages

Due to the rising awareness of climate change and resulting building regulations worldwide, building designers increasingly have to consider the energy performance of their building designs. Currently, performance simulation is mostly executed after the design stage and thus not integrated into design decision-making. In order to evaluate the dependencies of performance criteria on form, material and technical systems, building performance assessment has to be seamlessly integrated into the design process. In this approach, the capability of building information models to store multi-disciplinary information is utilized to access parameters necessary for performance calculations. In addition to the calculation of energy balances, the concept of exergy is used to evaluate the quality of energy sources, resulting in a higher flexibility of measures to optimize a building design. A prototypical tool integrated into a building information modelling software is described, enabling instantaneous energy and exergy calculations and the graphical visualisation of the resulting performance indices. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.