Advanced Building Simulation

Chapter 8
Developments in interoperability
Godfried Augenbroe
8.1 Introduction
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.
The development of the central model and the interfaces for each application grew
into a new discipline, over time developing its own underpinning methods and tools,
referred to as “product data technology” (PDT). The increased level of connectivity
that could be achieved was termed interoperability, as indeed different applications
would be able to “interoperate” through the shared data model, at least in principle.
The physical data exchange takes place through software interfaces that perform mappings
between global (neutral) and native (simulation view) representations. PDT provides
the tools and methods for information modeling of products and all associated
life cycle processes, with the aim to share that information within and across engineering,
design, manufacturing, and maintenance disciplines. It should be realized that
the building industry has characteristics that make the development of a “building