Toward the Integration of BIM Energy Saving Concepts

Nevertheless to say that Energy consumption has a negative significant impact on the environment. In this context, the buildings sector accounts for around a percentage of 30% of the world energy total consumption. Consequently, building designers should consider energy savings strategies in their designs to achieve a low level of energy consumption while maintaining their design goals. On the other hand, building energy performance assessments face difficult challenges. The main target of such paper is to evolve a newly easy-to-use integrated BIM-based framework to support decision making at the conceptual stage, which is considered the most critical phase of the design. This framework empowers designers to investigate more design options while achieving the high level of the energy performance. Utilizing the power of visual programming to set the key-parameters that have significant effects on the performance like building orientation and form, and with using the appropriate BIM tools to easily transfer the design from the conceptual phase to the schematic phase of the project. A case study was applied to showcase the implementation of this workflow. Designers with limited programming experience may use this workflow to perform a broad variety of design options analysis, take the conscious design decision and easily implement it with their BIM-based workflow which will effectively reduce the time of design, improve the collaboration between teams, cause a significant energy saving in the building, and inevitably reduce life-cycle cost of the building.