Past and ongoing research efforts toward seamless integration of building design and analysis have established a strong foothold in the building community. Yet, there is lack of seamless connectivity between Building Information Modeling (BIM) and building performance tools. D-BIM Workbench provides an essential framework to conduct integrated building performance assessments within BIM, an environment familiar to all stakeholders. With tighter tool integration within BIM, this open-source Workbench can be tailored to specific analysis such as energy, environmental, and economic impact of buildings. The Workbench, currently under development, will enable on-the-fly simulations of building performance tools to design, operate, and maintain a low / Net Zero Energy (NZE) built environment and beyond. This paper discusses the preliminary research in D-BIM Workbench development such as the Workbench architecture, its open-source environment, and other efforts currently under progress including integration of 3D heat transfer in the Workbench. INTRODUCTIONBuilding design and engineering is a complex process that involves participation of multiple stakeholders in a coordinated manner for efficient use of human and energy resources. Integration frameworks provide the necessary stage for such collaborations. Such frameworks include integration of building performance tools for design decision-making. There are integration tools that support building performance assessments ranging from daylighting studies to airflow simulations, with a common goal of optimizing building energy-and environmental-impacts. Establishing such an environment requires standard description of product models that define individual data objects and relationships to objects within the model, in a hierarchical representation. The formalization of STEP (ISO-10303, 1994) using EXPRESS data modeling language paved way for the development of more such integration. Particularly for built environments, the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), which is based on object-based inheritance hierarchy for alleviating interoperability issues, is significant (BuildingSMART 2012).978-1-4673-4781-5/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE Srinivasan, RS., Kibert, CJ., Fishwick, P., Ezzell, Z., Lakshmanan, J., Thakur, S., Ahmed, I. IFC, the neutral model for Architectural-Engineering-Construction (AEC) industry, is slated to become an official international standard ISO-16739. Moreover, it has become the catalyst for the exponential growth of a, now, well-known collaboration framework, the BIM. Several research attempted such integration starting from myriad, yet powerful, thermal / daylighting analysis, to more seamless integration of wireless sensor network with performance tools -a cyber-physical systems' approach. Since the design of standard product model representation, there had been remarkable increase in research efforts leading to robust tools. Thus, for the purposes of this paper, the development of integration tools is discussed under two, broadly classified groups namely, t...

We need to find better ways of allowing non-computing experts to construct visualizations of dynamic models within familiar domain-specific contexts. Current methods used to construct these customized views, however, are expensive since content experts must employ engineers to code the mathematical model that defines the dynamic behaviour of the scenario. Engineers must then somehow visualize the output of the model. These tasks are typically performed with engineering software tools or just pure computer programming. We define an interface and interaction model that compresses this engineering overhead, thus narrowing the user interface gap between mathematical modelling and three-dimensional interactive visualization design and consumption. We present an interaction theory and corresponding software prototype. Both are discussed using a human cardiovascular system case study.