Investigating Building Information Model (BIM) to Building Energy Simulation (BES): Interoperability and Simulation Results

Buildings are a main contributor to energy consumption, it accounts for approximately one-third of global energy use; therefore, Building Information Modelling (BIM) has become an emerging digital technology in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. There is a growing demand on applying BIM for low energy buildings including the building energy simulation (BES). However, there exist challenges for exchanging data and interoperability has caused barriers to utilize the information from BIM for BES. This paper explored the energy model accuracy of two different software including Autodesk Revit and DesignBuilder. The annual electricity consumption of the two programs were analyzed and compared to the actual measured consumption data of three typical residential building on different three locations including Cairo, Alexandria and Asyut. The outcomes suggest that comparisons may be made between building energy performance simulated data and measured data, nevertheless the outcomes might vary based on the human behavior patterns within the model. Additionally, the results show that DesignBuilder simulated data was close to actual data for the electricity consumption than the Revit however both programs were very close to the actual measured data.