An Analysis of BIM Web Service Requirements and Design to Support Energy Efficient Building Lifecycle

Energy Efficient Building (EEB) design, construction, and operations require the development and sharing of building information among different individuals, organizations, and computer applications. The Representational State Transfer (RESTful) Building Information Modeling (BIM) web service is a solution to enable an effective exchange of data. This paper presents an investigation into the core RESTful web service requirements needed to effectively support the EEB project lifecycle. The requirements include information exchange requirements, distributed collaboration requirements, internal data storage requirements, and partial model query requirements. We also propose a RESTful web service design model on different abstraction layers to enhance the BIM lifecycle in energy efficient building design. We have implemented a RESTful Application Program Interface (API) prototype on a mock BIMserver to demonstrate our idea. We evaluate our design by conducting a user study based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The results show that our design can enhance the efficiency of data exchange in EEB design scenarios.