Building Design and Simulation by Linking Product and Functional Use

The quality of buildings, in a long-term perspective, belongs to four aspects: the Building Object, the Users, their Interactions and Context. Based on this assumption, we model building process knowledge in architecture, engineering and construction (A/E/C) sector, as well as occurrences, which dynamically happen both in the built environment and in the building site. Studying the most common information standards in A/E/C sector, namely IFCs structure (and BIM proprietary application programs), we can observe that they are a product information model (PIM) developed by means of architectural space / building components approach. It is successful in terms of data exchange and information interoperability between programs, but not intended for a higher abstraction layer: the human understanding or semantic-based programs. This lack of semantics is reflected in the modelled/constructed buildings, for instance once it is required to simulate occupant behaviors in terms of usage, safety and comfort. There also is an urgent need for tools able to link and translate business rules and project processes to check where business processes are not following building policies and rules. With the aim of improving the quality of buildings and their use, this paper explores a method for representing and linking building process, product, and their functional use. This research group has formalized a general structure of building knowledge modeling to share semantics, not only information, by means of ontologies. Now the research group is working on early IT implementations to support logic synchronization between software for designing activities and software for authoring design. A hybrid approach for computational technique has been identified, combining (big) data-driven algorithm with ontology-based context reasoning, in order to achieve both, the best performance from intensive data-driven methods, and the finest adaptation for ontological context awareness.