A collaborative and Interoperable Approach to Building Thermal Comfort Analysis During Design

Abstract

This thesis firstly concentrates on defining exchange requirements to support collaborative BIM-based thermal comfort assessments during all stages of design including renovation design scenarios. This process includes a structured and format agnostic definition of exchange requirements to support BTCA. Moreover, the contributions of these exchange requirements informs the development of an IFC compliant MVD for BTCA that enables information sharing between various BIM tools during a project's design phases.

The second contribution is the development of a BTCA ontology based on Semantic Web technologies. The aim of the BTCA Ontology is to facilitate the access, processing and interpretation of the exchange requirements information to enable greater decision support with respect to building thermal comfort.

The third contribution enables reasoning over the BTCA Ontology through the development of a novel reasoning system to interpret BTCA information. This reasoner comprises a set of hierarchical and structured rules that process BTCA data and provide answers to an extensible set of competency questions. These rules enable actors to retrieve information by obtaining answers to complex questions related to building thermal conditions during the entire design process.