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Information management in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operation (AECO) industry is fragmented, which creates an information gap. This can be accredited to stakeholders working in a document-centric/filebased manner. Consequently, stakeholders do not have access to the most recent information on the building project, and there exist several sources of truth. The information gap significantly affects the Heating, Ventilation, and Cooling (HVAC) discipline. There is no single source of truth, meaning that Heating, Ventilation, and Cooling (HVAC) engineers have to acquire the information manually from all the stakeholders. To minimize the burden of information acquisition, HVAC simulation models are over-simplified and rarely reflect the physical reality of the HVAC system in the building. Due to the oversimplification of HVAC simulation models, most HVAC systems are oversized. Consequently, there is a gap between the predicted and measured performance of buildings, called the performance gap. The overall objective of this thesis was to provide the HVAC discipline in the AECO industry a place to centralize project-related information in a Common Data Environment (CDE) providing a single source of truth. The purpose of the CDE is to enable the digital transformation of the AECO industry through a platform that can be organically extended using a modular system architecture. Furthermore, the CDE aims to close the information gap for HVAC engineers and, as a result, reduce the performance gap. This thesis presents a CDE based on a microservice system architecture. The CDE can translate proprietary Building Information Modeling (BIM) models into an object-oriented database that provides a single source of truth for the project stakeholders. The database of the CDE is based on the Flow System Classes (FSC) and Thermal Zone Classes (THERM) object models developed in this thesis. Through the CDE’s microservice architecture

In recent years semantic web ontologies have improved data interoperability within architecture, engineering, construction, and operation of buildings. One of the persisting issues inhibiting quality assurance is a lack of robust model validation of BIM models used for HVAC flow system simulation and analysis. This article provides a novel approach for automating the BIM validation process using SHACL shapes and FSO/FPO ontologies. Using this approach will ensure that the BIM model contains the required HVAC information for simulating hydraulic systems. The paper presents multiple shapes developed to identify and validate typical HVAC design details in buildings.

Detailed simulations of HVAC systems play a crucial role in creating 1:1 digital twins of buildings and their systems. In particular, detailed models of hydronic systems are essential for fault detection of building services and control optimization. However, modeling HVAC systems is labour intensive due to the components and connections that one must create based on drawings or models. Creating the HVAC simulation models from BIM data eases the modelling burden, simplifying the creation of digital twins. Straight-forward HVAC simulations can aid the design process. Instead of prescriptive design based on the worst-case conditions, simulations enable performance-based design with partial-loads and dynamic behaviour. This paper presents a preliminary tool using BIM data to create and simulate models of heating systems. The tool uses a central BIM data platform with a dedicated data format – defining components and their relations in a database. Python scripts apply model templates to create heating system models in the Modelica language. The tool simulates the models in Dymola, while Python scripts read and parse the results to the database for visualization and analysis. The tool efficiently simulated a small heating system and obtained results for the return temperatures of several loops.

Building service systems are complex structures consisting of different subsystems and components in varying relationships. Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) can be used to represent these systems in decentralized triplestores using ontologies. To describe interconnected building service systems and the flow of matter, energy and data between them over the whole life-cycle in the context of the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operation (AECO) industry, two recent contributions, TUBES System Ontology (TSO) and Flow System Ontology (FSO) have to be considered. This study thus supports the effort towards a future semantic web of building data by validating the given ontologies based on Competency Questions (CQs) and an application example, proposing an alignment of TSO v0.3.0 and FSO v0.1.0 and providing a roadmap to a unified representation of building service systems in the AECO industry.

The interoperability of information from design to operations is an acknowledged challenge in the fields of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). As a potential solution to the interoperability issues, there has been increasing interest in how linked data and semantic web technologies can be used to establish an extendable data model. Semantic web ontologies have been developed for the AEC domain, but an ontology for describing the energy and mass flow between systems and components is missing. This study proposes the Flow Systems Ontology (FSO) for describing the composition of flow systems, and their mass and energy flows. Two example models are expressed using FSO vocabulary. SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) queries are performed to further demonstrate and validate the ontology. The main contribution consists of developing FSO as an ontology complementary to the existing ontologies. Finally, the paper introduces a roadmap for future developments building on FSO.