Context Presentation

In previous decades, environmental impact control through lifecycle analysis has become a hot topic in various fields. In some countries, such as France, the key figures for energy show that the building sector alone consumes around 45% of the energy produced each year. From this last observation emerged the idea to improve the methods hitherto employed in this field, in particular those related to the exchange of information between the various stakeholders involved throughout the lifecycle of a building. Information is particularly crucial for conducting various studies around the building; for instance, the assessment of the environmental impact of the latter. Concerning information exchange issues, the creation of open standards such as Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) or CityGML, but also semantic web technologies have been widely used to try to overcome it with some success elsewhere. Another striking issue is the heterogeneity between construction product databases. What would be particularly interesting is to know the environmental impact of a building at early phases of its lifecycle. However, there are a number of problems that still do not have solutions. This includes associating Building Information Modelling (BIM) and semantic web technologies with environmental databases to increase the flexibility needed to assess the building's environmental impact throughout its lifecycle.

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Figure 1: MINDOC methodology process

Scientific Goals

- Study how information exchange is made within experts during a building lifecycle in order to figure out interoperability gaps ;

- Fill some of the encountered gaps by mean of formalization of building information.

- Combined with the formalization of environmental data on construction products, the latter will enable the introduction of product data at an early stages of the building lifecycle.

Keywords

Knowledge Modeling & Semantic Reasoning - Merging Ontologies - Decision Support - Building Information Modeling (BIM) - Environmental Databases.

Contacts

justine-flore.tchouanguem-djuedja@enit.fr, Bernard.Kamsu-Foguem@enit.fr, camille.magniont@iut-tarbes.fr, mkarray@enit.fr, fabanda@brookes.ac.uk.