Integration of building material databases for IFC-based building performance analysis

IFC-based building energy performance and life cycle analysis require structured data about thermal, ecological, and financial building material properties (e.g., thermal conductivity, global warming potential, construction cost). Dedicated databases to these domains exist, but share no common property sets, making the mapping process of all required properties to the materials in the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) model, and subsequently to input data of energy performance engines or LCA/LCC software, labor intensive and error-prone. This study introduces (i) IFC property sets (psets) designed to fulfill the material input data requirements for EnergyPlus and the BIMERR LCA/LCC analysis module, (ii) third-party sources for providing the necessary input data, (iii) a building material classification system and ontology to integrate the identified data sources, (iv) a building material mapping approach to map similar building materials across different data sources, and (v) our validation results with three different building material databases and one real-world building.