A Bim Assisted Rule Based Approach for Checking of Green Building Design

ABSTRACT: Since the publication of green building standards from the last decade, the designer of green buildings have often encountered the challenges of limited time but considerable complexity in the process of evaluating their design according to the rules specified in the standards. Also, the design process is usually an iterative one, which includes rule-checking tasks that are tedious and repetitive. With the advancement of technologies in Building Information Modeling (BIM), artificial intelligence, and Virtual Reality (VR), this research investigates and develops a BIM-assisted Rule-based approach for automating checking of green building design. The developed approach utilizes as much information available in a building’s BIM model as possible to automate the design evaluation complied with green building standards. It also provides visual feedbacks through the BIM model to assist the designer in green building design. To evaluate and demonstrate this approach, an Application Programming Interface (API) tool has been developed in this research to extend the capability of BIM software for both automatic rule-checking of green building design and real-time visualization of feedbacks from the rule-checking. A rule base is used to manage the design rules specified in green building standards and facilitate the automation of rule checking. In addition, visualization of the rule-checking results (e.g. highlights of places in the design that do not satisfy the design requirements) is supported in a 3D VR environment of a building’s BIM model.