Live capture of energy-related knowledge into BIM systems

Energy management in buildings is about operating and maintaining many complex energy systems used by buildings' occupants. The generation and collection of energy-related building information commonly is fragmented, created over the building's life cycle by different teams with different objectives, and stored in different systems. The development of BIM systems has helped in storing this various information. However, the knowledge utilized in maintaining energy systems also has to be captured to develop a building portfolio that is comprehensive enough to benefit buildings' owners, occupants, and energy managers. Capturing knowledge in digital format is always a challenge when developing such systems. Therefore, this research proposes an innovative means for capturing energy-related knowledge when monitoring and maintaining building performance by the integration of a spoken dialogue system (SDS) with BIM models. SDS presents a natural language interface where the expert's utterances are understood and answered back in speech format. The advancements in spoken dialogue technology will be employed to enable capturing and retrieving experts/occupants' knowledge with the system interviewing the expert concerning the problem at hand. This interface also allows easier searching for solutions to new problems with a more comprehensive retrieval of information.