Future Cities for Climate Action: Automated Code Compliance Checking in Reference to Energy Efficiency Building Regulations

Cities around the world are facing many challenges in terms of population increase, energy consumption, transport, traffic congestion and water supply that result in huge waste, air pollution and colossal emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly CO2. Such huge increase of population would need housing and dwellings to accommodate such increase. Energy efficiency in buildings can result in mitigating energy use. In developing countries, building code compliance is not receiving enough attention from local authorities. The Energy Efficiency Code Compliance Checking (EECCC) is one of the most vital issues in making buildings low carbon, energy efficient and meet green standards, especially amid the urgent actions needed to offset climate change risks and attain sustainable development goals. This paper presents a BIM-based approach for automating compliance checking of the Egyptian code for enhancing energy efficiency in commercial buildings by virtue of visual programming language (VPL). The developed approach is capable to access data and information available in the BIM model during the preconstruction phase to automate the design evaluation complied with the energy code criteria. The VPL approach is flexible enough to modify the created nodes and links to build new or update the existing checking rules and thus facilitates the design checking process performed by designers, architects and urban designers.