Topological BIM for building performance management

Abstract

Despite the recognized benefits of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Building Performance Simulation (BPS), these procedures are often time- and resource-intensive, posing significant barriers to adoption in building management. While significant advancements have been made in automating BIM generation using scanning technologies, these applications often yield geometrically complex, product-oriented, and semantic-poor models, often incompatible with BPS tools, which are instead space-oriented. This paper introduces a semi-automated method for generating space-oriented BIM models tailored for BPS. The process utilizes topological and conditional modeling principles to create semantically defined, and information-rich models suitable for simulation environments called Topological BIM (TBIM). This method ensures semantic standardization, rapid digitization, and high interoperability, facilitating progressive data enrichment for building digital models. In the paper, a case study of a higher education building is presented to demonstrate the approach and validate a toolkit developed for delivering the TBIM models.