Development of a Model View Definition for Environmental and Energy Performance Assessment

Very often, building managers face the challenge of having to operate a building in the absence of the appropriate information about how it should function. This problem is one of the many reasons why buildings operate inefficiently and tend to consume excessive amounts of energy. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is an emerging technology which addresses the management of information throughout the Building Life-Cycle (BLC). Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is a non-proprietary data model of BIM that enables effective data integration over the BLC. IFC is a rich data model which may represent the entire building, however most applications are interested in a subset of this model. Hence, it is necessary to filter the information exchange between different applications and Model View Definitions (MVD) is the methodology to define such subsets. This paper presents the development of a MVD for environmental and energy performance assessment to support building managers during operation.