A demonstration of BIM-enabled quantitative circulation analysis using BERA language

This paper describes a BIM-enabled spatial analysis approach that enables us to compute specific quantitative data using BERA (Building Environment Rule and Analysis) Language and its tool. By comparing design alternatives for an actual building model, this paper also demonstrates building circulation and its associated properties of numeric data. The conventional software-driven approaches have intrinsic limitations that include limited interfaces, restricted parameters, closed rules except pre-defined rules, etc. A script language-based approach, however, is strongly necessary for various and flexible design review tasks especially for retrieving and computing specific dataset. This paper specifically demonstrates actual design review tasks as follows: 1) comparison and visualization of the differences between design alternatives in terms of their different spatial allocations; 2) analyzing numeric data result, NDBC (Numeric Data of Building Circulation), for evaluation of building circulation factors in each department of building; and as a result, 3) overall quantitative analysis and its result will be reported on given actual BIM models in order to support design decision making among various spatial allocation scenarios. For the actual demonstration presented in this paper, we modified some part of BERA language applications and defined appropriate BERA program code and Java code that are executable on given BIM models.