BIM to building energy performance simulation: An evaluation of current transfer processes

For over 25 years, data exchange between architectural BIM-based designs and Building Energy Performance Simulation (BEPS) have been proposed as a solution to reduce the amount of manual and error prone rework required to create typical BEPS models. The current state of the art lacks an effective, universal and robust system of data collation, processing, quality assessment and analysis while interfacing with existing tool-chains through a streamlined data transfer process. This paper investigates the reproducibility of current BIM to BEPS transfer processes through an experiment that compares these transfer processes, as used in industry, against each other. The experiment uses five residential archetype buildings and results from BEPS models in EnergyPlus indicate that there are many barriers, both technical and methodological, to achieving reproducible results between commonly available software tools. In some cases difficulties could not be overcome as the transformation process itself did not complete, leading to inconclusive results. In cases where successful transformations occurred, variations of up to 25.89% in annual energy consumption were discovered between processes. This hints to issues and limitations of the current processes and results.