From BIM2BEM: A Model-Driven Environment for Dependable Building Energy Models

The growing demand for energy-efficient buildings highlights the need for reliable Building Energy Modeling (BEM) to accurately predict and optimize performance throughout a building’s life cycle. However, current BEM workflows are often hindered by media breaks, tool interoperability challenges, and inconsistent model properties, leading to unreliable simulations. This work presents a novel model-driven environment designed to provide reliable, trustworthy building models used for BEM. Our approach utilizes model-driven engineering to enable seamless tool integration at the model level and provides automated enhancement of Building Information Models (BIM) with BEM-specific properties. Furthermore, we incorporate a model checker to ensure the correctness, consistency, and semantic integrity of these BEM-specific properties within the BIM model. The proposed environment integrates seamlessly with existing engineering workflows while facilitating efficient model hand-offs. The effectiveness and user acceptance of our proposal are demonstrated through a case-based evaluation and the Technology Acceptance Model. In practice, implementing this developed workflow and model-driven environment, designed for users in engineering and architecture, results in a consistent and reliable BEM for energy simulation tools, yielding reasonable simulation outcomes through default values. Additionally, this scalable approach lends itself to further applications, such as life cycle assessment tools or enriching models with company-specific content.