A Methodology for Indoor Human Comfort Analysis Based on BIM and Ontology

In the operations and maintenance (O&M) stage of a building, thermal comfort and acoustic comfort are essential for the health and productivity of occupants. There are many complaints about the indoor human comfort in office buildings due to inappropriate indoor temperature or noise. Building information modeling (BIM) technology is an efficient means for helping facility managers to capture complete information from the design and construction stages and deliver this valuable information to the operation stage. In addition, WELL building standard is a performance-based system for monitoring, measuring, and certifying metrics of the environment of buildings that impact human wellbeing and health. It is potential that leveraging environment condition data and BIM data to improve the indoor human comfort level based on WELL building standard. However, there is a lack of study on improving the indoor human comfort level using BIM technology and WELL building standard. Therefore, this study proposes the methodology of applying BIM technology and WELL standard to improve the thermal comfort and acoustic comfort. BIM provides geometric and semantic information for different BIM engineering analysis software to simulate comfort zones in office buildings. Ontology engineering approach is adopted to establish the knowledge and relationship among observation data from sensor network, occupant behavior, indoor human comfort index, and indoor human comfort situation. Ontology can address the information interoperability among these different domains. In addition, an illustrative example is studied to verify the feasibility of the proposed methodology. The results indicate the methodology can be applied to evaluate the indoor human comfort based on thermal comfort and acoustic comfort index. Finally, some recommendations are given to facility managers to improve the indoor human comfort level.