Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BIMERR (BIM-based holistic tools for Energy-driven Renovation of existing Residences)
Reporting period: 2020-07-01 to 2021-12-31
1. Facilitate the acceleration of the renovation trend to meet the EU policy objectives by demonstrating the BIMERR tools in actual renovation sites to prove their impact and providing best practice examples to the AEC community
2. Establish semantic interoperability among the diverse popular standards, formats and data models in the construction industry and reach out to standardization bodies with concrete and demonstrated proposals for linking and mapping them toward a unified way to retrieve building information
3. Develop innovative methods, techniques, and tools for the (semi-)automated creation of enhanced digital building models of existing buildings to remove one of the main barriers to renovation
4. Deliver novel renovation support tools to ease and improve the efficiency of the renovation process for all stakeholders involved
5. Promote the adoption of the BIMERR solution as renovation-enabling toolkit through intense dissemination and knowledge transfer of the project outcomes toward the targeted stakeholders, reaching out to audiences within and beyond the EU
- Release of the final version of all BIMERR components and tools. Each component was validated against the use cases for its usability, the functional and non-functional requirements’ coverage, and its capability to the KPIs that have been defined for the impact assessment of the project as part of its evaluation methodology;
- Packaging, delivery and deployment of two versions of the integrated BIMERR ecosystem, including all measures that have been taken for secure information exchange among all software components deployed in different locations and platforms;
- All BIMERR tools and the first version of the integrated BIMERR system have been introduced in two pre-validation sites. The scope of the pre-validation activities has been the early detection of BIMERR components’ faults, identification of additional functionalities that should be provided by the final release of the integrated BIMERR ecosystem, and familiarization of relevant stakeholders with the use of the BIMERR tools. The work involving potential end-users combined with the second living lab workshop series constitutes a further measure towards a user-driven innovation environment;
- Major progress has been done during the second period on refining the evaluation methodology and further planning of its usage during the project’s validation and evaluation phase. In the context of five demonstration scenarios in Poland and Spain, (1) a Gantt chart has been drafted, presenting the duration and dependencies of all activities that each demonstration scenario includes, and (2) additional information is provided about potential blockers that are identified, and KPIs that are considered;
- The integration of the BIMERR solution with professional BIM software has been investigated by the BIMERR consortium using commercial SDKs such as ODA, Revit API and GeometryGym. This is groundwork for further exploitation activities in the next period.
2.Innovative process modelling for energy-efficient building renovation activities - A holistic renovation process modelling approach is being developed which refines and re-purposes powerful process automation and workflow management tools for the construction domain in order to link the digital twin into the real-world, while also exploring process simulation to estimate the impact of unpredictable factors and a cross-layer monitoring framework evaluating close to real-time and simulated alternative process options, so as to optimize e.g. cost, time, disruption
3.Enhanced scan-to-BIM - Automatic Scan-to-BIM algorithms that are specifically geared towards the problem of energy retrofit, detecting and modelling building components of particular value to energy analysis and modelling, are being developed based on machine learning techniques
4.In-situ building feature extraction via Augmented Reality & Deep Learning - Marker-less object recognition, registration and tracking is being developed based on a hybrid approach to object recognition and tracking
Regarding the work towards a wide uptake of BIMERR solutions and their further impact, the first period outcomes are: i) the BIMERR evaluation methodology, a robust framework which defines the KPIs that match all impact targets: renovation process duration, renovation process cost, user acceptance, energy efficiency, occupants comfort and air quality, sustainability, and economic issues; ii) a set of initial versions of all BIMERR tools to be used as early demonstrators; iii) prepone activities in the pre-pilot sites which allows for an early start of data collection and tools’ validation; iv) Living lab workshops conducted in Poland and Spain and engaging representatives of 7 main user groups (architect, BIM modeller, building surveyor, project manager, site manager, worker, occupant); v) foreground work on the generation of best-practice examples to directly relate to AEC stakeholders.
The progress made during the first period is the foreground work to achieve the social, economic and environmental impacts set for the project. A wide uptake application of the BIMERR solutions will lead to significant annual energy savings, emissions reduction, real state value increase of the EU building stock. Based on these results, BIMERR will also contribute to tackling the energy poverty problem in the EU and to create jobs.