Towards sustainability through energy efficient buildings design: semantic labels

When designing buildings, it is a challenge to take into account Energy Efficiency in the early design stage. This is especially difficult for hospital designs, because these buildings comprise many different room types and functions. This greatly increases the number of design directions available. Choices made early on in the design process have a large impact on the final performance of the building. However, the lack of detailing available in early designs makes it hard to evaluate them in terms of Key Performance Indicators. The Semantic Labels developed as part of the STREAMER project provide a way to address this problem, by allowing structured capture of the most relevant aspects of the Program of Requirements. Using this method, design rules can be applied to early building designs to detect and correct inconsistencies or suboptimal solutions. Also, using default values for label values, an early design can already be evaluated using simulation tools. The Semantic labels describe standard values for Construction (floor height and strength, accessibility), Hygiene class (from public spaces to operational theatres), Equipment (electric power requirements, safety), User profile (when the room is used), Comfort class (like daylight) and Access security (who can enter). Design rules may express conditions like the preferred spatial separation between rooms, or whether rooms should be placed at outer walls, but may also highlight incompatibilities in e.g. access requirements and user profiles. The Early Design Configurator, also under development as part of the STREAMER project, uses the Semantic Labels to allow automatic conversion of a Programme of Requirements, into an initial Building Information Modeling (BIM) design proposal that respects the design rules.