Sustainability-open: Why every building will be sustainable in the future

Sustainability-open: Why every building will be sustainable in the future

Coenders, J.L.

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Structural Engineering

2013-09-30

In this paper the initiative “sustainability-open” will be introduced. The aim of the initiative is to take away one of the reasons why buildings and other objects in the built environment are often not designed in a sustainable manner: the availability of clear and insightful software to analyse and assess the sustainable performance of the design. Most software applications designed for this purpose do not reveal their internal and implicit method to designers and cannot be easily adapted to the purposes of the designer or engineer. “sustainability-open” consists of an opensource framework on which both open-source and close-source components can be build which contain the specific design, analysis and assessment knowledge for these purposes. The development consists of a framework and components. The open-source framework and the components developed by the research team are available free of charge, which means that cost is no longer an issue to design in a sustainable manner. The initiative is open for people and companies to contribute and extend by development of their own, optionally closed-source components. The framework development as well as a set of components, which are based on the research projects performed at the BEMNext Lab of Delft University of Technology, are managed by the research team. However, this should not stop anybody to develop and contribute new components to initiative. The current framework includes concepts for automated ‘designers’, ‘analysis methods’ and ‘assessment methods’. Automated designers perform automated tasks or methods to produce a digital design or contribute to an existing, static design. ‘Designers’ can be used to encode some of the knowledge the designing engineers have. Analysis components perform some type of analysis, such as a thermal analysis, to produce analysis results, which can be used in further analysis or assessments. Assessment components produce the assessment, such as the total amount of energy used in the building, the operating energy or the embodied energy. The framework currently integrates with Grasshopper (Davidson 2013) and development is taking place to integrate with a variety of BIM software (Eastman 1999) applications. The paper will present the initiative, the methodology behind the development, the framework and different components, and an outlook towards further research and developments, which will be implemented in the (near) future.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4e34d99e-c711-4f18-8722-7d31d6e789ab

978-3-89462-243-5

Rethinking prototyping: Proceedings of the Design Modelling Symposium, Berlin, Germany, 30 September-2 October 2013; Authors version

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2013 The Author(s)