A BIM based open source system model for high energy performance residential buildings

The vast use of energy in buildings coupled with the energy dependency of Turkey emerge as a significant challenge. Existing residential buildings have large portion in total energy use. The interest for high energy performance building design and construction is evermore increasing in both public and private sectors. The design, construction and management of high performance buildings require an advanced level of various expertise and technological capabilities in every phase of the building lifecycle. The lack of enough expertise and consultation and increased expenses put serious barriers for achieving industry-wide adoption of performance centric building design and construction. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is perceived as a combination of technology, methods and process which supports integrated design and project delivery processes. BIM posess significant advantages over existing information technologies in the AEC. BIM use is becoming more popular in high performance building design with its distinctive features like parametric building components, automation and simulation and increased adaptability and components generation. Novel approaches combining BIM methods with open source systems have potentials to transform the traditional business models and processes for high performance building design and contruction. this may increase the accesability to required expertise, knowledge and know-how especially by the small-size AEC firms. The proposed model in this study includes the development of pre-designed prototypical BIM models-seed models, creation of open source system structure and further evaluation of its deployment with carefully devised case studies. This study utilized Autodesk Revit as tshe main BIM platform. All seed-BIM models were created and further simulated using Green Building Studio with a criteria framework for high performance building features.