Extending IFC to support thermal comfort prediction during design

At the early design stage of construction projects, designers often rely on general rules of thumb to make critical decisions about the geometry, construction systems and materials used in their designs without fully evaluating their effects on indoor thermal environment requirements and constraints. Currently, reviewing designs’ sustainability requires that designers spend a significant amount of time manually extracting Thermal Comfort (TC) data from BIM models. Data extraction for Building Thermal Comfort Simulation (BTCS) assessment presents a challenging task, especially in large and complex projects, in which designers may neglect important data pertinent to, or extract unnecessary data from, their designs. This paper is motivated by the absence of a standard method and a schema for extracting the necessary data for an automated TC assessment of building designs. The aim to generate a reusable and retrievable Exchange Requirement's for BIM-based BTCS to facilitate efficient data extraction and exchanges from design models using an IFC file format. Furthermore, we develop an MVD mechanism that provides a structured framework for the definition and exchange of the target data as a step towards standardisation and production of BTCS related information, the results from which contribute to a proposed MVD. The application of the MVD in building design has the potential to improve the early-stage TC assessment of design alternatives. Further, it could reduce the time required to conduct the assessment, increases its accuracy, and formalises the method used.