Automated matching of design information in BIM to regulatory information in energy codes

Building energy compliance checking aims to check the compliance of building design information, embedded in building information models (BIMs), with applicable energy rules. To automate the compliance checking process, such design information should be automatically extracted from the BIM and matched to the energy rules. This paper proposes an information extraction method for automated extraction of design information from BIMs, and a semantic matching method for automated matching of the extracted information to the energy rules. The Revit API was used to export the design information captured in a Revit model to an industry foundation classes (IFC) data model format. EXPRESS-based information extraction methods and Java-based post-processing techniques were used to parse the exported IFC data model and extract the design information to an intermediate semantic representation. A semantic matching method was developed and used to select the design information that matches/relates to the energy rules. The algorithms for extraction and matching of design information to energy rules were tested and evaluated using the BIM of an educational building and a set of rules extracted from energy codes. A performance of 98.0% recall and 89.2% precision was achieved in matching, which shows that the proposed methods are effective in automatically extracting design information from BIMs and matching the information to energy rules.