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

The new European Directive 2014/24 / EU requires for all member States the use of BIM procedures in the construction of public buildings. 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 recognized by the European Directive Standards for BIM procedures, in order to assess its use for simulations of buildings. IFC, described by the ISO 16739 (2013), is today 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 room and on all building components, including details of the type for 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 possible demolition at the end of life. The present study aims at carrying out a first analysis on the IFC data format, which will be further deepened in successive 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 the gbXML (Green Building XML), highlighting the missing required information 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.