ABSTRACT
Building is a team effort in which many tasks have to be coordinated in a collaborative process. The aims and tools of the architect, the engineer, and many other players have to merge into a well-orchestrated design process. Because of the disparity of software tools, each specialist traditionally operates on an island of isolation until the time comes to match and patch with other members of the design team. Energy efficiency, optimal HVAC design, optimal visual, thermal, and acoustic comfort in buildings can only be accomplished by combining a variety of expert skills and tools through high bandwidth communication with designers in an inherently complex group process. What adds to the complexity is that the interacting “actors” come from separate disciplines and have different backgrounds. Adequate management of this group process must guarantee that design decisions are taken at the right moment with the participation of all involved disciplines. To accomplish this, one needs to be able to execute a wide variety of software applications rapidly and effectively. This has led to the need for “interoperability” between software applications. For the last fifteen years, a sustained research effort has been devoted to achieving this in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (A/E/C) industry. This chapter provides an overview of this work and discusses trends and future objectives of the area. The focus is on the role of building simulation tools and the typical interface problems that they pose. What started in the 1960s and 1970s as one-to-one “interfacing” of applications was soon realized to be non-scalable. In the 1980s therefore work started on the development of shared central building models, which would relieve the need for application-to-application interfaces, as depicted in Figure 8.1.
