Chadwick GreenBIM: Advancing Operational Understanding of Historical Buildings with BIM to Support Sustainable Use

Chadwick GreenBIM is an initiative to establish a digital 3D as-built model of UCL’s Chadwick Building including embedded environmental data to gain a greater understanding of its operation with the aim of developing concepts for retrofit and sustainable use. This paper investigates the above by reviewing the state of the art in reality capture to generate a parametric model using laser scanning. It also considers the challenges of managing information for simulation including complex ‘big data’ types (e.g. point clouds). The research in this paper was carried out through an empirical approach to create a data-rich Building Information Model (BIM) under real world conditions. Real world measurements of environmental conditions were used to validate the effectiveness of simulations using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software packages. In addition, the practicalities of the integration of such data inside the BIM were investigated. Data capture using the methods described in this paper requires extraordinary effort and is expensive in both time and cost. However, advances in BIM enabling technologies such as Indoor Mobile Mapping (IMM) seek improved savings in data collection. Technological advances will further improve the integration of data capture and extraction of information used by simulation tools. Once complete it is envisaged that the GreenBIM model would be disseminated among a broad community of researchers to investigate various perspectives in a collaborative manner.