Information modelling for sustainable buildings

Achieving sustainability has become an important goal in the construction, refurbishment, operation and management of buildings. To this end, we need to achieve greater information exchange, especially, about practices and solutions for Energy Efficiency (EE) and the use of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) in buildings. However, in the building life-cycle, complex and disparate information sources are used by various stakeholders, thus understanding, integrating, managing and providing means for sharing such information is a challenging task. In this paper, we analyze the possibilities to capture, distill and disseminate expert know-how related to sustainable buildings, addressing the needs of the various stakeholders. A Sustainable Building Profile (SBP) is presented, which is a novel conceptual model designed to integrate information on EE and RES aspects of buildings. The SBP makes it possible to analyse the transformation of a particular building over time. Different stakeholders can use it to study various engineering, operation and maintenance problems in buildings related to energy efficiency.