A recent press release fromASHRAEbrings news of a new research project, one of 13 approved at ASHRAE’s recent 2009 Annual Conference, that will “develop open-source reference models by which developers may test their solutions to interoperability between BIM and energy simulation software.”

The release goes on to say that the project will “focus on the most common thermal features in buildings assumed to have the greatest impact on energy use, and provide guidelines for describing thermal models extracted from BIM and the rules for extracting those models used in whole building energy analysis applications.”

To learn more about this and other research projects, visithttp://www.ashrae.org/pressroom/detail/17243