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continuous verification of the whole building life cycle (Laine, Hanninen and Karola,
2007) . The monitoring BIM contains detailed information regarding sensor and actuator
relationships, current values in terms of structural health, environment, such as
temperature and humidity, load characteristics of HVAC systems and efficiencies relating
to energy losses particularly with rooms with no occupancy. The building should not be
delivering energy to persistently unoccupied areas, and using occupancy data from PIR
sensors, the self-reporting element of the BIM can monitor lighting and heating loads in
those areas. Examples of real-time monitoring systems developed in the sample house
BMS are shown in Figure 7a) relating to vibration characteristics, in terms of measured
accelerations (structural health) and Figure 7b) showing real – time breakdown of energy
consumption (power monitoring). The sample house BMS performs structural health
assessment by measuring accelerations from Arduino based sensors attached to floor
beams, and a database keeps a recorded state of the overall health of the BIM structural
model. The real-time breakdown of energy is updated every 6 seconds from Current
Cost energy monitors, giving a quick overview where energy is being most consumed,
allowing reduction strategies to be developed.
a) Real time accelerations b) Real-time energy-consumption
Figure 7: Online monitoring shown in webpage
2.4 BIM in the Building Management System Layer
Use of BIM does not need to end at the initial design or construction stages but needs to
continue throughout the lifecycle of the building and find a place within the Building
Management System (BMS). Incorporating the BIM into the BMS can help design the
management system in terms of sensor/actuator relationships and by further combining
the relationship with actual monitored data, intelligence can be created with on-line
simulation control strategies and provide fault detection and diagnostics (Provan et al.,
2009). Importantly, for structural analysis and fault detection, a structural health
monitoring system can update a structural BIM model, to determine overall building
structural health, particularly for earthquake regions, or overloads in large crowd loading
scenarios. Furthermore, in terms of a Building Simulation data model, monitored data
can be fed into a simulation tool to predict various outcomes of different scenarios to
optimise energy use. This is particularly useful for energy consumptive services such as
HVAC, where simulations can be run to ascertain optimum start-up times for the heating
