Project description:

The building design industry is challenged by increased demands regarding energy as well as thermal comfort, air quality and daylight. These demands require that design decisions in the early design stage are based on careful considerations about their potential impact on energy efficiency and environmental comfort. To ease this design task, there are research-based efforts focusing on enhancing efficient use of performance simulations as design support. However, there seems to be a low uptake of these research efforts in professional design practise. A reason might be that current proposals for procedures interpret wrong what architects actually need. Therefore, the approach seems rather to adapt the performance simulations to fit the design practise, than suggesting new procedures.

Another issue known from practise is that knowledge and information regarding functional demands, which is carefully selected in the early design stage, is often lost when replacing people in transition between design phases. The performance of the final building is consequently not fulfilling the initial intentions and demands, resulting in costly remediation.

This Ph.D project aims to develop performance simulations conformed to fit the design practise, as well as appropriate protocols for information flow through building design phases. Both embedded in building information model (BIM), and tested through case studies of building projects in the industry. Thus, performance will, hopefully, be considered in the early design phase, and valuable information will become the basis for the subsequent design phases.

Project title: Performance simulations and information flow in building information models

Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Steffen Petersen