The Building Information Model and the IFC standard: analysis of the characteristics necessary for the acoustic and energy simulation of buildings

The new European Directive 2014/24/EU requires the use of BIM procedures in the construction of public buildings for all member States. The countries belonging to the European Union shall be obliged to transpose the Directive and adapt their procedures to that effect. The paper analyzes the IFC format, the only one recognized by the European Directive Standards for BIM procedures, to assess its use for simulations of buildings. IFC, described by the ISO 16739:2013 standard (ISO, 2013), is a standard that describes the topology of the constructive elements of the building and what belongs to it, overall. The format includes geometrical information on the rooms and on all building components, including details of the type of performance (transmittance, fire resistance, sound insulation), in other words it is an independent object file for the software producers to which, according to the European Directive, it will be compulsory to refer in the near future, during the different stages of the life of a building from the design phase, to management, and the possible demolition at the end of its life. The present study aims at carrying out a first analysis on the IFC data format, which will be further studied in-depth in the following phases. The study will compare the information and data contained in it, with those in other formats already used for energy simulations of buildings such as the gbXML (Green Building XML), highlighting the required information missing, and proposing the inclusion of new data for energetic and acoustic simulation. More generally the attention is focused on the building physics simulation software which is implemented to exploit the BIM model potential enabling interoperability.