Combining BIM and Ontology to Facilitate Intelligent Green Building Evaluation

Abstract

Green building evaluation is an effective measure to reflect the sustainability performance of buildings and is beneficial to improve the deteriorating environment. However, most evaluation tasks are conducted in a manual way nowadays, which is time-consuming, laborious, and error-prone. Thus, a new approach taking advantage of building information model (BIM) and ontology is proposed in this paper to facilitate the process of green building evaluation. Information-rich BIM serves as the provider of multidisciplinary data required for green building evaluation while green building evaluation ontology (GBEOntology) is used for representing fragmented information included in evaluation standards. The reasoning process is realized in a Jess rule engine combining semantic web rule language (SWRL) rules and ontology web language (OWL) ontology. The proposed approach can save time and realize the reuse of green building evaluation standard knowledge. An implemented test case validates the effectiveness of the proposed approach by looking at the example of Evaluation Standard for Green Building (GB/T5378-214) of China.