Building energy modelling and monitoring by integration of IoT devices and Building Information Models

In recent years, the research about energy waste and CO2 emission reduction has gained a strong momentum, also pushed by European and national funding initiatives. The main purpose of this large effort is to reduce the effects of greenhouse emission, climate change to head for a sustainable society. In this scenario, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a key role. From one side, advances in physical and environmental information sensing, communication and processing, enabled the monitoring of energy behaviour of buildings in real-time. The access to this information has been made easy and ubiquitous thank to Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and protocols. From the other side, the creation of digital repositories of buildings and districts (i.e. Building Information Models - BIM) enabled the development of complex and rich energy models that can be used for simulation and prediction purposes. As such, an opportunity is emerging of mixing these two information categories to either create better models and to detect unwanted or inefficient energy behaviours. In this paper, we present a software architecture for management and simulation of energy behaviours in buildings that integrates heterogeneous data such as BIM, IoT, GIS (Geographical Information System) and meteorological services. This integration allows: i) (near-) real-time visualisation of energy consumption information in the building context and ii) building performance evaluation through energy modelling and simulation exploiting data from the field and real weather conditions. Finally, we discuss the experimental results obtained in a real-world case-study.