Building as a System: Adopting Systems Engineering Technology in BIM - considering Performance and Sustainability of Built Environment

The increasing call for a sustainable building accompanying its enhanced energy performance and individual comfort expresses the demand for an integrated design process that makes stakeholders from various engineering disciplinaries working together with concurrent communications. Within some comparable industry fields, the concept of "systems engineering" is introduced in order to provide a holistic model on a high abstraction level to support the product life-cycle management and provide rational predictive supports on design stages. The method Building Information Modeling (BIM) offers the possibility of the introduction of a centralized common data environment to describe multi-scalar building elements with their logical relationships.

Research approaches are brought up in the industry of built environment concerning the topic of energy efficiency and sustainability to augment the BIM-data model with mathematical descriptions to enable simulation technologies to assist a decision maker. In the scope of this topic, our group is focusing on an open framework with integrated building information not only for design phases but can also be used in real operation in the life-cycle of the building environment by implementing flexible interfaces and supports of communication protocols to provide an insight to further tasks like smart controlling of energy consumptive housing devices and facility management, which should be properly considered with their impacts early in design phases. The aim is to evolve a BIM-platform into a life-cycle management tool with combined modules to build a "bridge" between design and operational processes so that the building systems engineers and device manufacturers can be involved in early design stages and their contributions will go through in the whole life-cycle. Therefore the sustainability of a built environment can be managed concurrently and with high information consistency.