Due to the long life cycle of a building the expenses for usage and maintenance are very high compared to those for the construction, only. About 1/3 of the total energy demand in Germany is used for heating, air-conditioning and hot water supply in buildings. In addition the building wastes resulting for disposal represent a quantitatively enormous material flow. As the most significant decisions are made in early planning steps it is very important to enable planners to estimate the energy demand, resource requirement and ecological impact of different scenarios at this stage. Nowadays more and more architects and engineers use CAD software, like the Architectural Desktop from Autodesk, supporting the generation of three dimensional product models. One prominent model being now well established in the building industry is defined by the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). This model is also the starting point of our resource oriented design system. To get a basis for a comparative assessment of different design variants it is first necessary to augment the product model with information on resource consumption of the used materials. Therefore a database server accessible via the Internet is developed within our research project providing a service for planners to extend their product model with information necessary for life cycle assessment (LCA) and building energy simulation (EnEV). The data exchange format for the property sets is ifcXML. In our presentation the general software concept together with first simulation tools will be discussed.     «

Due to the long life cycle of a building the expenses for usage and maintenance are very high compared to those for the construction, only. About 1/3 of the total energy demand in Germany is used for heating, air-conditioning and hot water supply in buildings. In addition the building wastes resulting for disposal represent a quantitatively enormous material flow. As the most significant decisions are made in early planning steps it is very important to enable planners to estimate the energy dem...     »