This report was created for ASHRAE for the ASHRAE-RP 1468 project. The work on the project was performed by faculty and students of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University. There are three volumes that make up this report. This is the first of these reports. This report contains the rules and guidelines for mapping a given Building Information Model (BIM), created with BIM authoring tools such as Autodesk Revit, into a Building Energy Simulation (BES) description for energy simulations. The report presents the need for integrating these two categories of tools (BIM & BES) and the need for developing guidelines for mapping the model with accuracy and consistency.

Chapter 1 provides information on the pressing need and reasons for integrating the tools to help designers to make rational and scientifically supported decisions to achieve the objective of high performance buildings and enable exploration of hypothetical scenarios that can lead to better decisions.

Chapter 2 provides the issues involved in the integrations of the tools and objectives of the research that involves identifying the subset of building information that is captured in contemporary BIM systems which is most relevant and significant to energy simulation, and devise a plausible map from BIM information to the building thermal model that is the input to energy simulation. For example how an interior, layered wall modeled in BIM should be mapped to BES model. Furthermore, the fidelity and accuracy were also discussed in the process of mapping and how results (i.e., after mapping) differ for different building energy simulation programs as a consequence of differences in algorithms used in the simulations. A concise table of all the building features studied along with the recommendations (i.e., mapping rule) to translate from BIM tool to BES tools is provided. The rules of mapping were mostly written for the DOE-2.1e simulation program.

Chapter 3 describes in detail the rules for mapping the identified subset of building features which are relevant and significant to energy simulation along with the argument to support the rule.