Topology-Informed Method for Constructing Instance-Level Mappings between Building Information Models and Building Energy Models

Streamlining the creation of building energy models (BEMs) based on building information models (BIMs) is essential for evaluating the energy efficiency of building design quickly. A major challenge in the current practice of BIM-based BEM modeling is automated change propagation from BIM to BEM. To enable this, instance-level mapping relationships between BIM and BEM are necessary. Current methods of mapping instances in BIM and BEM rely solely on building components’ specification information, such as spatial location or geometric information, to create invariant signatures for labeling instances from models across different domains, which limits generalizability, particularly for BEMs that do not contain explicit geometric representation of building components, like Modelica models. This study proposes a method that utilizes topological information rather than specification information of building components to create the invariant signature across instances from BIM to BEM. Implementations on three residential building cases demonstrate the proposed method’s feasibility and effectiveness. This study contributes to the existing BIM-BEM interoperability research by introducing topological information as an invariant signature and proposing a hierarchical mapping of building components between BIM and different types of BEM, thus addressing the cross-domain inconsistency issue rooted in specification information–based methods in current studies.