A collaborative platform for sustainable building design based on model integration over the internet

Considerable potential exists for reducing life cycle environmental impacts of buildings in Japan. While energy consumption during the operation stage of a building's lifetime is usually dominant, indirect energy use and pollutant emissions associated with production and disposal of building materials during construction and demolition are significant. For sustainable building design, interactions between the performance and dynamics of the building structure and energy systems must be considered. A collaborative platform based on the distributed object-based modeling environment, DOME, and a set of component models for sustainable building design analysis is presented. Integration examples of the component models to study particular building designs are described.