Design of Energy-Neutral Smart Buildings: An Ontological Framework to Integrate LCA, BIM and PLM

The smart built environment (SBE) exhibits a dynamic integration between the physical and digital environment, where the physical elements, such as spaces, walls, windows, doors, roof, and floor, interact with the digital sensing elements, such as sensors, actuators, control systems, and networking systems. Energy neutrality is a concept dealing with the lifecycle energy performance of energy-saving sensing devices integrated into the SBE, such as the smart sensor-actuator system (SSAS). Ontology is a concept of representing and organising information (and their inter-relationships) about a specific domain with the intention of managing complexity, enhancing understanding, and promoting problem-solving skills. Employing semantic web technologies, a framework for designing and simulating energy-neutral, sensor-embedded smart buildings is proposed, which exhibits an ontological integration of Lifecycle Assessment (LCA), Building Information Modelling (BIM), and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). A preliminary implementation of the proposed framework is demonstrated using OWL (Ontological Web Language) in Protégé software. After that, a design interaction matrix between buildings (and their components), building designers, product designers, and lifecycle practitioners is developed to provide efficiency, optimisation, and sustainability in the design process. This integration framework would streamline the design process, providing a collaborative simulation platform for cross-field designers to enhance the environmental performance of the SBE. In the future, this framework could be employed to create a robust real-time integrated IoT-based platform for designing and modelling energy-neutral smart buildings.