Perspectives and Practices of Collaborative Energy Design Technologies for Closing the Building Energy Performance Gap

Abstract

Both researchers and practitioners have increasingly observed the significant deviation of buildings’ actual energy consumption from their design predictions, which is known as “performance gap”. The organizational and procedural fragmentation of multi-disciplinary stakeholders in building has been realized to be a major cause of the performance gap. Nevertheless, little previous research addressed the performance gap from the perspective of improving design team’s collaboration. The widespread adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and web-based information and communication technologies (ICT) has generated a paradigm shift of stakeholders’ mode of collaborative design. The aim of this paper is thus to contribute to a better understanding of how collaborative strategies and technologies can be utilized for building energy design in order to close the performance gap. The research was carried out through the combination of a critical literature review, two rounds of semi-structured personal interviews, and the development of a technical platform prototype. Through the review, a theoretical framework of collaborative building energy design was constructed. The first-round interviews were conducted with fifteen representatives of five building professional groups, namely, architect, system engineer, developer, contractor, and facility manager, and their specific needs and expectations were identified, such as better BIM integration. The second-round interviews were conducted with five BIM and ICT providers, and their main concerns were found to be technical feasibility, data management and security. Three typical state-of-the-art energy design tools were examined comparatively, which outlines important technical features of collaborative building energy design. A web-based technical platform prototype was then developed. Symbiotic workflows and organizational structures were investigated to better facilitate the implementation of the platform across disciplines. The findings indicate that the integration of BIM and web-based ICT into building energy design is crucial to improve information integrity. The framework constructed provides a novel approach to understanding collaborative energy design, and the technical platform developed has the potential of closing the building energy performance gap.