Background and motivation
Building Information Modeling (BIM) has become more and more used in Danish building design and construction. By allowing a greater inter-connection between design phases, BIM software is an
essential tool for decreasing costs and delivery time of building projects, as well as increasing productivity and quality [1, 2]. However, a major hindering in a widespread use of BIM consists in the difficulty of efficiently exporting selected building information to third-parties tools for other engineering applications. Closing the gap between software used in the different engineering fields and the modern BIM environment, could provide early feedback in the design process and thereby enhance the structural design process. Despite some efforts have been made in this sense in the past few years [3, 4, 5, 6], there are no widely used solutions enabling an efficient utilization of building data generated for most engineering applications, such as structural and geotechnical design, installation for indoor climate or fire safety [7]. In particular, structural fire safety is a branch that could greatly benefit from an earlier integration with architectural and structural design. This is because structural elements are generally designed at ultimate limit states (ULS) and optimized at service limit states (SLS). Structural fire verifications come at the end of the design process and normally result in the addition of expensive and sometimes also environmental-unfriendly insulation layers, which could have been reduced or avoided, by considering fire issues earlier in the design.
Object and method
The project moves from the achievement of two previous works carried out last semester at DTU [5, 6], which aimed at developing a BIM-integrated verification and design tool for single structural elements exposed to standard and parametric fire. The software is based on pyton scripts that implements the graphical user interface (GUI) and the calculation algorithms of structural verification tool an on a Dynamo script that handles the integration with the BIM platform Revit. The aim of this project is to further develop the work, either by improving the BIM integration platform by means of a IFC integration that does not rely on Dynamo, or by improving the structural verification tool, by implementing new functions and importing and exporting new parameters from/to the BIM model, such as load and boundary conditions, fire compartment properties, and others.
Essential literature
[1] Nembrini J., Samberger S., Labelle G. (2014): Parametric scripting for early design performance simulation, Energy and Buildings, 68, pp.786-798
[2] Jungsik C., Hansaem K., Inhan K. (2015): Open BIM-based quantity take-off system for schematic estimation of building frame in the early design stage, J. of Computational Design and Engineering 2, pp. 16-25.
[3] Jong Bum Kim, W. J. (2015). Developing a physical BIMlibrary for building thermal energy simulation. Automation in Construction, 16-28.
[4] Wahbeh, W. (2017): Building skins, parametric design tools and BIM platforms. 12th Int. conf. of Advanced Building Skins, Bern, Switzerland.
[5] Beltrani L., Giuliani L., Karlshøj J. (2018): Fast track BIM integration for structural fire design of steel elements, proc. of the 12th European Conference on Product and Process Modelling (ECPPM 2018), 12-14 September 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark
[6] Andersen M., Dyr T. (2018): Automatic and BIM-Integrated Fire Design of Steel Elements, MSc report, Department of Civil Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen
[7] Törmä, S. (2015): Web of building data - integrating IFC with the Web of Data, proc. of the 10th European Conference on Product and Process Modelling (ECPPM 2014), Vienna, Austria