Integrating BIM and Decision-Making System for HVAC Design of Low Rise Green Buildings
Author: Bohan Yuan
Publisher:
Published: 2020
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDuring the past decade, building energy consumption has risen significantly. Meanwhile, the building area is being increased at a high speed. The conflict between high building energy consumption and low energy efficiency has attracted great attention in the construction industry. HVAC system contributes to most of the whole building energy consumption. Thus, it is imperative to study and analyze the means of HVAC system's energy conservation. This study aims at addressing two specific challenges: (1) the lack of knowledge to know the kind of HVAC performance that can be evaluated as the criteria for decision making; and (2) the lack of efficient methods for collecting HVAC system and equipment data to comprehend the information used by decision makers. An effective way to minimize these challenges is to predict the HVAC performance of a new building at the conceptual design stage through the application of energy simulation tools. However, the development process of these tools is usually isolated, which results in having the information of a building model that is created by other tools cannot be shared. On another side, there is a need to establish an energy conservation expert system to use during the design of the HVAC systems for buildings. Based on the above, this study integrates Building Information Modeling (BIM) and decision-making system to select HVAC systems for buildings. First, the basic of HVAC components and systems are collected and stored in specific database that will be used for the optimization of HVAC design. Various types of heating/cooling equipment are presented based on ASHRAE standards. Second, the environmental, economic, technical performance and green building rating system are summarized as the criteria for evaluating HVAC performance. Then a combined AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and Entropy structure for HVAC system is introduced as the Decision-making method. Finally, the interoperability of BIM tool is developed to bridge the connection between BIM tool and the HVAC decision making systems through the whole life cycle of buildings. The entire model is coded in Visual Studio via C#. The model is tested through a project to prove its workability and dependency.
