scholarly journals The Effect of Uncertainty in Whole Building Simulation Models for Purposes of Generating Control Strategies

Author(s):  
Amar Kumar Seeam ◽  
David Laurenson ◽  
Asif Usmani

Buildings consume a significant amount of energy worldwide in maintaining comfort for occupants. Building energy management systems (BEMS) are employed to ensure that the energy consumed is used efficiently. However these systems often do not adequately perform in minimising energy use. This is due to a number of reasons, including poor configuration or a lack of information such as being able to anticipate changes in weather conditions. We are now at the stage that building behaviour can be simulated, whereby simulation tools can be used to predict building conditions, and therefore enable buildings to use energy more efficiently, when integrated with BEMS. What is required though, is an accurate model of the building which can effectively represent the building processes, for building simulation. Building information modelling (BIM) is a relatively new method of representing building models, however there still remains the issue of data translation between a BIM and simulation model, which requires calibration with a measured set of data. If there a lack of information or a poor translation, a level of uncertaintly is introduced which can affect the simulation’s ability to accurate predict control strategies for BEMS. This paper explores effects of uncertainty, by making assumptions on a building model due to a lack of information. It will be shown that building model calibration as a method of addressing uncertainty is no substitute for a well defined model.

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 469-481
Author(s):  
Kay Rogage ◽  
David Greenwood

The operation and maintenance of built assets is crucial for optimising their whole life cost and efficiency. Historically, however, there has been a general failure in the transfer information between the design-and-construct (D&C) and operate-and-maintain (O&M) phases of the asset lifecycle. The recent steady uptake of digital technologies, such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) in the D&C phase has been accompanied by an expectation that this would enable better transfer of information to those responsible for O&M. Progress has been slow, with practitioners being unsure as to how to incorporate BIM into their working practices. Three types of challenge are identified, related to communication, experience and technology. In examining the last aspect, it appears that a major problem has been that of interoperability between building information models and the many computer-aided facilities management (CAFM) systems in use. The successful and automatic transfer of information from a building model to an FM tool is, in theory, achievable through the medium of the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) schema. However, this relies upon the authoring of the model in terms of how well its structure permits the identification of relevant objects, their relationships and attributes. The testing of over 100 anonymised building models revealed that very few did; prohibiting their straightforward mapping to the maintenance database we had selected for the test. An alternative, hybrid approach was developed using an open-source software toolkit to identify objects by their geometry as well as their classification, thus enabling their automatic transfer. In some cases, manual transfer proved necessary. The implications are that while these problems can be overcome on a case-by-case basis, interoperability between D&C and O&M systems will not become standard until it is accommodated by appropriate and informed authoring of building models.


Author(s):  
Mohamed El-Mekawy ◽  
Anders Östman

The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) are the two most prominent semantic models for the representation of Building Information Models (BIM) and geospatial objects. IFC and CityGML use different terminologies to describe the same domain, and there is a great heterogeneity in their semantics. For bidirectional conversions between these models, an intermediate Unified Building Model (UBM) is proposed that facilitates the transfer of spatial information from IFC to CityGML and vice versa. A unified model in the current study is defined as a superset model that is extended to contain all the features and objects from both IFC and CityGML building models. The conversion is a two-steps process in which a model is first converted to the unified model and then to the target model.


Author(s):  
M. Aksin ◽  
İ. R. Karaş

Abstract. In addition to making our daily life easier with the use of it in different areas of our lives, technology continues to be used increasingly with different applications in many sectors.With the increase of developments in the construction sector, which is the locomotive of many sectors, different applications have been used in the field of modelling. But a building needs many projects such as static, dynamic, electricity, installation, furniture, etc. While these sectors are working with different software specific to them, it has been possible to work on these building projects in a single project by the help of BIM (Building Information Modelling).In addition to its function of projecting new buildings, BIM is an important development and building model in terms of preserving historical buildings, easily creating original building details, and transferring them to future generations without deterioration. The term HBIM (Historic / Heritage Building Information Modelling) has been brought to the literature by using the BIM model in historical buildings.The known history of Safranbolu district of Karabük in Turkey dates back to 3000 years. Safranbolu, which has hosted Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman empires in its history, has buildings that are still preserved with their originality. These structures were built in the pre-Ottoman, the Ottoman and the Republic periods.In our study, historical buildings such as houses, commercial houses, places of worship, inns, baths, fountains, and clock towers will be examined. Building models and distinctive features were examined to classify these structures by modeling them with BIM.While the differentiation of the buildings can be made easily by the building model, the distinguishing features of the houses built in different periods or by different civilizations were also determined in order to distinguish the housing types.While structures such as baths, clock towers or inns are not in a number that can be classified, it has been observed that there are residences, businesses and places of worship that can be classified. It has been determined that it is possible to classify the buildings by their materials, building sizes and shapes, and by their other features that can be used to classify.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 35-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed El-Mekawy ◽  
Anders Östman

The current cadastral systems are usually based on a 2D parcel maps and land registries having references to different documents. In many countries, the parcel maps, as well as the registries and referenced documents, are represented digitally. The 3D cadastral systems have usually a similar approach, where the descriptions of the 3D components are represented by drawings in PDF format. This article focuses on creating the 3D geometries corresponding to 3D property based on existing 3D building models. The article investigates shortages of IFC and CityGML, the most prominent semantic building models for representation of BIM and geospatial models respectively, as well as a unified building model (UBM) that was developed earlier for modelling complete and real 3D cadastre information system. The result shows that IFC, CityGML, nor the UBM has capabilities for such tasks. The article proposes an extension to the UBM in adding different subtypes to the boundary surfaces above and underground. The extended UBM is then implemented in a case study of a hospital building in Sweden. The implementation shows that by adding the four subtypes “Building Elements Surfaces,” “Digging Surfaces,” “Protecting Area Surfaces,” and “Real Estate Boundary Surfaces” of boundary surfaces, it has become possible to model all the needed surfaces that define 3D cadastral information of a building.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 1889
Author(s):  
Junxiang Zhu ◽  
Peng Wu

The development of a smart city and digital twin requires the integration of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), where BIM models are to be integrated into GIS for visualization and/or analysis. However, the intrinsic differences between BIM and GIS have led to enormous problems in BIM-to-GIS data conversion, and the use of City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) has further escalated this issue. This study aims to facilitate the use of BIM models in GIS by proposing using the shapefile format, and a creative approach for converting Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) to shapefile was developed by integrating a computer graphics technique. Thirteen building models were used to validate the proposed method. The result shows that: (1) the IFC-to-shapefile conversion is easier and more flexible to realize than the IFC-to-CityGML conversion, and (2) the computer graphics technique can improve the efficiency and reliability of BIM-to-GIS data conversion. This study can facilitate the use of BIM information in GIS and benefit studies working on digital twins and smart cities where building models are to be processed and integrated in GIS, or any other studies that need to manipulate IFC geometry in depth.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 362
Author(s):  
Junxiang Zhu ◽  
Peng Wu

Previous geo-referencing approaches for building information modeling (BIM) models can be problematic due to: (a) the different interpretations of the term ‘geo-referencing’, (b) the insufficient consideration of the placement hierarchy of the industry foundation classes (IFCs), and (c) the misunderstanding that a common way to embed spatial reference information for IFC is absent. Therefore, the objective of this study is to (1) clarify the meaning of geo-referencing in the context of BIM/GIS data integration, and (2) develop a common geo-referencing approach for IFC. To achieve the goal, a systematic and thorough investigation into the IFC standard was conducted to assess the geo-referencing capability of IFC. Based on the investigation, a geo-referencing approach was established using IFC entities that are common in different IFC versions, which makes the proposed approach common to IFC. Such a geo-referencing approach supports automatic geo-referencing that would facilitate the use of BIM models in GIS, e.g., for the construction of digital twins.


i-com ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Tutzauer ◽  
Susanne Becker ◽  
Norbert Haala

AbstractWhile the generation of geometric 3D virtual models has become feasible to a great extent, the enrichment of the resulting urban building models with semantics remains an open research question in the field of geoinformation and geovisualisation. This additional information is not only valuable for applications like Building Information Modeling (BIM) but also offers possibilities to enhance the visual insight for humans when interacting with that kind of data. Depending on the application, presenting users the highest level of detail of building models is often neither the most informative nor feasible way. For example when using mobile apps, resources and display sizes are quite limited. A concrete use case is the imparting of building use types in urban scenes to users. Within our preliminary work, user studies helped to identify important features for the human ability to associate a building with its correct usage type. In this work we now embed this knowledge into building category-specific grammars to automatically modify the geometry of a building to align its visual appearance to its underlying use type. If the building category for a model is not known beforehand, we investigate its feature space and try to derive its use type from there. Within the context of this work, we developed a Virtual Reality (VR) framework that gives the user the possibility to switch between different building representation types while moving in the VR world, thus enabling us in the future to evaluate the potential and effect of the grammar-enhanced building model in an immersive environment.


Author(s):  
Zhenni Wu ◽  
Hengxin Chen ◽  
Bin Fang ◽  
Zihao Li ◽  
Xinrun Chen

With the rapid development of computer technology, building pose estimation combined with Augmented Reality (AR) can play a crucial role in the field of urban planning and architectural design. For example, a virtual building model can be placed into a realistic scenario acquired by a Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to visually observe whether the building can integrate well with its surroundings, thus optimizing the design of the building. In the work, we contribute a building dataset for pose estimation named BD3D. To obtain accurate building pose, we use a physical camera which can simulate realistic cameras in Unity3D to simulate UAVs perspective and use virtual building models as objects. We propose a novel neural network that combines MultiBin module with PoseNet architecture to estimate the building pose. Sometimes, the building is symmetry and ambiguity causes its different surfaces to have similar features, making it difficult for CNNs to learn the differential features between the different surfaces. We propose a generalized world coordinate system repositioning strategy to deal with it. We evaluate our network with the strategy on BD3D, and the angle error is reduced to [Formula: see text] from [Formula: see text]. Code and dataset have been made available at: https://github.com/JellyFive/Building-pose-estimation-from-the-perspective-of-UAVs-based-on-CNNs .


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 00014
Author(s):  
Lluc Canals Casals ◽  
Lucía Igualada ◽  
Cristina Corchero

Smart buildings are a key element to walk towards smart cities and grids. Nonetheless, there are several degrees of intelligence. A first step is to incorporate commercial self-consumption solutions in buildings so they can manage the energy from local renewable power generators. A second step is to substitute this commercial solutions with an optimized Energy Management System (EMS) to reduce the electricity bill at the end of the month. Further. This EMS may contribute to stabilize and improve the quality and emissions of the electricity grid by offering some energy flexibility to the electricity system in favour of decentralization. This study compares the battery aging between buildings that count with an EMS to optimize the electricity bill under three scenarios in contrast to those that have a simple self-consumption kit. Lithium ion battery lifespan is estimated by means of an electric equivalent battery circuit model that runs on Matlab and simulates its behaviour through time. Moreover, this study evaluates the distribution of the battery costs regarding its use, observing that batteries controlled by simple self-consumption kits have longer lifespan because they are underused, ending up in higher calendar aging costs than the ones that are controlled by EMS.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document