Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, Division Engineering of Adaptive Systems EAS
Connecting building and facility simulations can enhance a building’s energy performance. Simulation results help improve the planning, sizing and operation of buildings and their facilities. Yet at the moment there are significant hurdles to using simulations in day-to-day planning: there are no robust models for building and facility technology or the associated control engineering, nor is there any way to connect these with each other.
Highly time-consuming and costly processes for developing models are another obstacle impeding widespread deployment. A wide variety of modeling tools and datasets are applied to different sub aspects and to different players. Great effort goes into adapting the resulting models to each set of questions, and their usefulness in other scenarios is severely limited.
The Approach
This project further develops the models developed by the consortium partners and, with the help of the functional mockup interface (FMI) standard, prepares and tests ways to link them and designs these links to be suitable for everyday use. With its project partners, Fraunhofer IIS/EAS investigates the extent to which established methods for model development and exchange can be transferred from other industries to the construction industry. The FMI standard supports the linking of different models without revealing their source code, so that the intellectual property of the model developer remains protected.
FMI4BIM will test and standardize the use of existing models and processes in the planning, commissioning and operation of buildings with Building Information Modeling (BIM).
In doing so, the project will play a key role in the digitalization of the construction and building industry.
