The STREAMER project

Solutions developed

We have investigated the criteria and methodologies to implement a taxonomy of healthcare districts focused on energy-efficient buildings morphology and features. This comprises methodologies to define and develop a model-based classification of hospital buildings and spaces that will become the basis for the development of semantic BIM ‘templates’ for models. STREAMER extends the existing high-level Layer Model into Semantic Labels, that are used to characterize hospitals at level of buildings, functional areas or space units, and therefore fills the gap between the high level and detailed approaches. In this way, the design process can incorporate energy efficiency effects of design decisions in a much earlier stage. Work has been done to expand and integrate the knowledge on hospital technologies for Mechanical Electrical and Plumbing systems.

Main results

Many energy efficient solutions for installations are available on the market, but this is not enough to reach the overall goals, so the project has to define additional measures. Also, an analysis of energy optimization possibilities at inter-building level by considering the interaction of buildings within a healthcare district and in relation with the surrounding neighborhoods has been made. A set of KPIs relevant for hospital design has been defined. This is the basis for a dashboard that informs all stakeholders during a design process on the expected performance of a specific design, and gives an early indication of the impact of a design decision. The most important category is the energy performance; for this, a number of energy simulation software packages has been assessed on their suitability to be incorporated in the STREAMER platform, especially regarding their level of integration with building information models (BIM). A second group of KPIs is in the Life Cycle Cost field, and the third group of KPIs addresses the (operational) quality of the building. To verify the requirements during the design process, it must be possible to process them automatically for a specific design. For this, an analysis of semantic technology has been conducted, both for technology development and standardization. For incorporating neighborhood designs, techniques to integrate BIM (building level) and GIS (neighborhood level) have been explored and demonstrated.