The impact of AI in building performance simulation will be a hot topic at the upcoming Building Simulation Conference 2025.
Lund University Faculty of Engineering professor, Pieter de Wilde, will explore various emerging technologies, including machine learning, large language models and digital twins.
He will examine how they interact with each other, and what this means for building simulation and the wider building engineering field going forward.
His main research emphasis is on thermal building performance simulation, and its use in the building services and engineering community.
He also has an interest in building performance monitoring in their actual day-to-day context which enables critical reflection on the validity of computational results, and their meaning in building operation and facility management practice.
He has authored over 290 publications on various topics related to building performance, including the seminal academic book Building Performance Analysis which was published in 2018 and which is the third book to be endorsed by IBPSA.
He will also host a workshop to explore and address some of the challenges in linking Building Information Models (BIM) to Building Energy Models (BEM).
The integration of BIM and BEM remains a challenge.
Issues such as incomplete data imports, errors, and the need for manual intervention undermine the benefits of BIM-BEM integration, delaying progress toward more sustainable, energy-efficient designs.
Furthermore, many stakeholders have yet to fully embrace standard practices for reliable BIM-BEM data exchange.
This workshop aims to bring together experts in BIM, building performance simulation (particularly in terms of energy), and building engineering to identify and discuss obstacles, share experiences, and collaborate on innovative solutions.
Another international speaker will be Michael Donn, Associate Professor in Building Environments at the Wellington School of Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington (NZ). His research interests are centred around the believability of calculations of the likely performance and environmental impact of buildings.
His focus is Quality Assurance (QA) in building performance simulation. His talk will explore the issue of appropriate use of building performance simulation across a range of fields. Donn has spent three decades using simulation in the teaching of architecture and building science students.
The Building Simulation Conference will be held from August 24-27 at the Brisbane Convention Centre. It will run concurrently with ARBSQLD which will be held from August 27-28, 2025.