Conceptual Performance and Product Models for Buildings and Their Elements

A conceptual model is presented for building elements to enable performance simulation. The proposal enshrines three interrelated subsystems. The first two are concerned with constraints and performance requirements respectively as notional entities and the third with physical objects related to buildings, e.g. elements. The notional subsystem for representing the performance requirements comprises transitive entities. These are listed as Life cycle phases, Participants, Domains. The subsystem that conveys information on physical objects on the other hand has an hierarchical order and encompasses intransitive entities, namely Building, Space, Element, Components. Thus by superposition of the performance requirement model on the element model a requirement for any given physical entity, e.g. a building element, can be expressed as indexed to the relevant instance of all three entities of this subsystem in any order.