Development Of Building Energy-Efficient Design Software Based On BIM Technology

Building energy consumption has long been a great part of total energy consumption of society. With the rapid development of economy, people will be more and more concerned on the comfort level of buildings. Naturally enough, energy saving is of great importance under such circumstances.Building energy-efficient design is of paramount importance in building energy saving. Energy-efficient design software at the time is playing a good part in building energy-efficient design. However, due to the limitation of current design concept and techniques, problems exist during the working process, such as mass work on remodeling or model modification. Such problems cause low working efficiency, thus restrict the development of energy-efficient design. With the development of Building Information Modeling (BIM), there is a necessity of study on the BIM-based building energy-efficient design software, to solve the shortcuts of existing software, thus enhance working efficiency during this working process.This study covers most of the important issues in the development of BIM-based building energy-efficient design software. After analysis on the basic requirements of building energy-efficient design software in China, it aims to design detailed functions of the system, and develop the system based on the design.Firstly, based on the information requirement of building energy-efficient design, each aspect of the information is expressed using IFC (Industry Foundation Classes), in order to verify the completeness of IFC standard in this study. It is revealed that IFC standard can be used to express the information for building energy-efficient design in China, and the established model can be applied in the development of building energy-efficient design software. Secondly, method for IDF to express the information in building energy-efficient design is studied, the information model based on IDF is established, and the mechanism for the data conversion between IFC and IDF is proposed. Thirdly, several adjustments are made on the existing working flow and the system model, to make them suited to practical applications better. Detailed designs of the software are made. At last, according to the system design, the software is being developed with the help of an IFC file from an actual project.This study has solved many key problems in the research of the BIM-based building energy-efficient design software. It lays a solid foundation for the follow-up research works.