Geometric Accuracy of BIM-BEM Transformation Workflows: Bridging the State-of-the-Art and Practice

The building industry is responding to the demands of high-performance buildings by leveraging Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) framework which facilitates stakeholder collaboration, supported by a digital platform named Building Information Modelling (BIM), as well as Building Energy Modelling (BEM) to quantify the performance effects of design choices. However, effective collaboration with BEM domain expert is yet to be realized due to the limitations in automated data exchange, largely arising from geometric transformation, necessitating a costly manual re-organization of data across disciplines. In this thesis, a BIM-BEM geometry comparison tool is developed, and three available BIM-BEM transformation workflows are examined through a case study. The case study shows that the choice of BIM-BEM workflow incurs a considerable geometric deviation, inducing deviations in simulated performances. A semi-manual approach is deemed the most appropriate workflow today, however, a fully automatic approach (Revit Systems Analysis) is promising for the future of automated data exchange.