Utilization of Water Resources and Sustainable Crop Production

BIM is representing a shift in the traditional process of building delivery. Its adoption in US reached 71% in 2012 rising from 17% in 2007; moreover, Europe is going to adopt BIM for public contracting as promoted by the European Union Public Procurement Directive. Meanwhile, BIM is widely diffused in UK and Northern Europe, as it includes a more accurate documentation, less rework and shorter project timelines. The use of BIM to provide data for energy performance evaluation and sustainability assessment is defined Green BIM and pioneering design organizations are adopting this approach to enable integrated design, construction and maintenance towards Net Zero Energy buildings. Green BIM includes Building Energy Modelling dealing with project energy performance to identify options optimising building energy efficiency during the life cycle. By allowing revisions during the design phase, project teams can ensure that customers' green ambitions beyond regulation compliance can be realized, together with technical and economic requirements. Thus, BIM can provide information to support the calculation of a number of credit points to define goal levels of sustainability related to rating systems. The aim of the paper is to investigate the opportunity to include the "green dimension" in BIM considering the more diffused rating systems.</p

Tracking users' behaviors through real-time information in BIMs: Workflow for interconnection in the Brescia Smart Campus Demonstrator

An intelligent building supports the needs of its occupants by data analytics. Nowadays, buildings are evolving from being products to become effective service providers for end-users: thus, occupancy topics become crucial. The paper focuses on building operations, pointing out how advantages in supporting the needs of users could be derived through the implementation of Building Management Systems (BMS) into a Building Information Modeling (BIM) environment, connecting real-time information collected by sensors to a BIM database. The connection and the integration of information between BIM and BMS have been established based on the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) neutral data format; moreover, web-interfaces and apps have been tested for enhancing information to be visualized by different end-users. The ongoing research has a twofold scope: 1) to point-out how buildings should evolve, managing knowledge coming from sensors in order to anticipate the needs of users, and 2) to analyze whether and how the centrality of users should change the building process. The proposed workflow has been tested on the Brescia Smart Campus Demonstrator, a building equipped with 94 off-the-shelf sensors

A Simple Method for the Comparison of Bioclimatic Design Strategies Based on Dynamic Indoor Thermal Comfort Assessment for School Buildings

Bioclimatic design strategies have been proposed for decades, on a qualitative basis, because a quantitative approach, ineludibly based on dynamic measurements or simulations, was too expansive and complex. If simulation considerably evolved, in the last years, in terms of speed, cost and diffusion of available tools, their utilization is still complicated by the managing a huge amount of hourly data. The passive behavior of a building, moreover, is not effortlessly synthetized: conditioned buildings may be easily compared just summing the hourly consumption of primary energy, while buildings with no thermal plant need more sophisticated statistical analyses because in these kind of buildings, it is particularly difficult to assess the effect thermal inertia. The existing school buildings stock has a strong need of energy renovation in accordance with Government vision of a community 24 hours a day use and consequently increasing the requirement of comfort conditions and energy consumption. Hence, a current school building heated and not cooled is considered as application field of the novel methodology and a classroom is used to test different energy retrofit solutions compared against a base-line, in terms of capacity to decrease the indoor air temperature variation. The analyzed simulations have been thus compared with ideal comfort conditions by an original analysis approach based on a visual tool as a support for designers in choices comparison to simply assess and visualize the performance of building technologies

A serious game for lean construction education enabled by Internet of Things

Previous studies have shown that the learning performance of students greatly increases once personal experiences are made possible. In construction education, few serious gaming environments are available to boost the students’ thirst of discovery and interaction. As of now, theoretical content like lean principles is often taught by frontal classroom style teaching. This paper describes the development and preliminary testing of a first of a kind serious gaming platform that introduces construction engineering and management students to hands-on learning. The novelty of the developed platform is that it combines the previously separate methods of Building Information Modeling (BIM), Internet of things (IoT), and Lean Construction (LC) in one (serious) game. Technical aspects of the platform and results to its evaluation in a classroom setting are presented. The added value to learning is shown as part of learning curves automatically generated from the players’ data. While such data were previously not available, some still existing limitations and an outlook present the next steps in establishing such serious games in construction education

A simple method for the comparison of bioclimatic design strategies based on dynamic indoor thermal comfort assessment for school buildings

Bioclimatic design strategies have been proposed for decades, on a qualitative basis, because a quantitative approach, ineludibly based on dynamic measurements or simulations, was too expansive and complex. If simulation considerably evolved, in the last years, in terms of speed, cost and diffusion of available tools, their utilization is still complicated by the managing a huge amount of hourly data. The passive behavior of a building, moreover, is not effortlessly synthetized: conditioned buildings may be easily compared just summing the hourly consumption of primary energy, while buildings with no thermal plant need more sophisticated statistical analyses because in these kind of buildings, it is particularly difficult to assess the effect thermal inertia. The existing school buildings stock has a strong need of energy renovation in accordance with Government vision of a community 24 hours a day use and consequently increasing the requirement of comfort conditions and energy consumption. Hence, a current school building heated and not cooled is considered as application field of the novel methodology and a classroom is used to test different energy retrofit solutions compared against a base-line, in terms of capacity to decrease the indoor air temperature variation. The analyzed simulations have been thus compared with ideal comfort conditions by an original analysis approach based on a visual tool as a support for designers in choices comparison to simply assess and visualize the performance of building technologies

Application of biological growth risk models to the management of built heritage

The quality of the interior spaces is strongly related to the hygro-thermal conditions which affect the users’ comfort, and may yield to preservation risk for the built heritage. Moreover, careless management of exposition spaces with excessive occupancy may result in moisture loads that promote degradation. In this paper, as a case study, an exposition hall representative of the built heritage is considered. The microbiological growth risk is investigated at two different climate conditions, namely Milan and Barcelona, considering varying ventilation rates and number of visitors. The results outline the need of policies informed by advanced analyses to prevent hygro-thermal risk in the absence of dedicated building services, that cannot always be integrated in built heritage