A Prototypical Automated Building Modeling Tool

Building energy modeling is a complex and time consuming process. Automation may reduce the complexity and cost associated to the building modeling process; especially when highly specialized personnel are necessary. This paper presents a prototypical building model generation tool which automatically generates a complex building model for thermal simulation. The generated models allow forecasting of yearly or monthly thermal energy demand of a building, and are able to consider individual conditions for every floor with respect to different load profiles as well as geometry. These two features improve the quality of the energy consumption forecast significantly, especially by increasing the range of possible applications to multiusage buildings e.g. partially used as residential or office building. A proof of concept has been performed for typical building geometries to outline the following benefits: reduction of modeling effort, improvement of the energy performance evaluation and comparability between buildings with similar geometries.