The traditional over-the-bench methodology for the design of a building is resulting in failure costs, failures at delivery and severe problems. An interactive top-down approach is required, both for the communication process necessary to facilitate the design, construction, maintenance and operation of an indoor environment and for the establishment of end-users' wishes and demands (requirements and needs). The system engineering approach used in other industries is discussed based on the results of three European and one national project. The outcome reveals that the applied top-down approach seems to be an improvement for the building process, but we still have a long way to go. Despite the obvious bottlenecks observed in the selection of team members and the communication process, it can be concluded that to be really usable, the top-down approach needs to be facilitated by a framework that clarifies to all stakeholders the links between system requirements, design and technical requirements for the different phases of a building. The framework also needs to separate the generic from the specified requirements for a particular building.

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ABSTRACT:The subject of energy-efficient buildings (EeB) is among the most urgent research priorities in the European Union (EU). In order to achieve the broadest impact, innovative approaches to EeB need to resolve challenges at the neighbourhood level, instead of only focusing on improvements of individual buildings. For this purpose, the design phase of new building projects as well as building retrofitting projects is the crucial moment for integrating multi-scale EeB solutions. In EeB design process, clients, architects, technical designers, contractors, and end-users altogether need new methods and tools for designing energy-efficiency buildings integrated in their neighbourhoods. Since the scope of designing covers multiple dimensions, the new design methodology relies on the inter-operability between Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Geospatial Information Systems (GIS). Design for EeB optimisation needs to put attention on the inter-connections between the architectural systems and the MEP/HVAC systems, as well as on the relation of Product Lifecycle Modelling (PLM), Building Management Systems (BMS), BIM and GIS. This paper is descriptive and it presents an actual EU FP7 large-scale collaborative research project titled STREAMER. The research on the inter-operability between BIM and GIS for holistic design of energy-efficient buildings in neighbourhood scale is supported by real case studies of mixed-use healthcare districts. The new design methodology encompasses all scales and all lifecycle phases of the built environment, as well as the whole lifecycle of the information models that comprises: Building Information Model (BIM), Building Assembly Model (BAM), Building Energy Model (BEM), and Building Operation Optimisation Model (BOOM).

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