Abstract
When designing buildings, it is a challenge to take into account Energy Efficiency in the early design stage. This is especially difficult for hospital designs, because these buildings comprise many different room types and functions. This greatly increases the number of design directions available. Choices made early on in the design process have a large impact on the final performance of the building. However, the lack of detailing available in early designs makes it hard to evaluate them in terms of Key Performance Indicators. The Semantic Labels developed as part of the STREAMER project provide a way to address this problem, by allowing structured capture of the most relevant aspects of the Program of Requirements. Using this method, design rules can be applied to early building designs to detect and correct inconsistencies or suboptimal solutions. Also, using default values for label values, an early design can already be evaluated using simulation tools. The Semantic labels describe standard values for Construction (floor height and strength, accessibility), Hygiene class (from public spaces to operational theatres), Equipment (electric power requirements, safety), User profile (when the room is used), Comfort class (like daylight) and Access security (who can enter). Design rules may express conditions like the preferred spatial separation between rooms, or whether rooms should be placed at outer walls, but may also highlight incompatibilities in e.g. access requirements and user profiles. The Early Design Configurator, also under development as part of the STREAMER project, uses the Semantic Labels to allow automatic conversion of a Programme of Requirements, into an initial Building Information Modeling (BIM) design proposal that respects the design rules.
Highlights
Innovative solutions for sustainability is an area of scientific interest, which will maintain its urgency for the nearest decade, at least (e.g. Rezk et al 2016; Šimelytė et al 2016; Strielkowski et al 2016; Razminienė et al 2016)
The methodology allows for the use of metadata like size, weighing loads, and on-board presence periods in algorithms to generate and evaluate proposals for possible placement of these objects.In optimizing the early design of buildings for energy efficiency, the design rules methodology creates and evaluates alternatives based on different outer shell layouts, but bases its design proposals on different groupings of activities taking place in the rooms described in the Program of Requirements (PoR)
The Early Design Configurator (EDC) is a tool that is being developed as part of the STREAMER project
Summary
Innovative solutions for sustainability is an area of scientific interest, which will maintain its urgency for the nearest decade, at least (e.g. Rezk et al 2016; Šimelytė et al 2016; Strielkowski et al 2016; Razminienė et al 2016). Designing complex buildings involves the integration of many stakeholder group perspectives, and requires optimization against a large number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) This is especially true for hospitals, where functions that include a wide range of different requirements have to be integrated into a single design solution. A major problem in early design generation and assessment is that names assigned to spatial elements during the initial phase of a design, do not define either the properties or the performance values for that spatial element Another problem is that creating different designs and comparing them in terms of energy efficiency, quality, and cost is very labour-intensive. The semantic labels enable the definition of design rules that can be created to make tacit knowledge of various stakeholders (designers, users) explicit
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