A user-centric approach in BIM environments for energy efficiency, indoor comfort assessment and renovation planning

The Chapter 7 of Agenda 21 calls, among others, for promoting sustainable construction industry activities, human resource development and capacity-building for human settlements development. Tremendous efforts for achieving this target in the construction sector still need to be made and the challenge of European climate-neutrality by 2050 seems like a utopia. The development of new technologies, materials and processes for low environmental impacts interventions are usually addressed to new buildings and infrastructures, but sustainable cities need proper and effective strategies of LCA-based renovations to reduce considerably their carbon footprint. New human-centric approaches can help maximizing awareness and benefits on sustainability of renovations. With this in mind, the exploitation of digital tools such as Building Information Modelling (BIM), the Internet of Things (IoT) and an occupant-centric approach for energy efficiency, indoor comfort improvement and participative renovation planning can be extremely effective to contribute to UN SDG 11. This paper describes the results in applying two BIM-based tools, namely BIMPlanner and BIM4Occupants, developed within the EU funded project BIM4EEB to improve sharing, on one side, useful data construction works progress among renovation stakeholders and, on the other side, tailored information about indoor conditions, comfort preferences and energy consumption with inhabitants. Therefore, the paper describes a pilot building, namely the Italian demonstration application of the project, to show the feasibility of the proposed tools. Benefits connected to the BIM framework and IoT devices result in an improvement of data sharing and communication between renovation stakeholders, then in an enhanced and real-time updated building process.