Building Information Modeling-based user activity simulation and evaluation method for improving designer–user communications

There are continuous interactions between the designers and users during early architectural design stage. However, users’ limited comprehension in the three dimensional space may reduce the efficiency of requirement specification as well as design review process. This paper introduces a Building Information Modeling-based user activity simulation and evaluation method (UASEM), which aims to facilitate the designer-user communications. It assists users to specify their activities in new buildings and simulates these activities based on the building information models. It also helps to conduct a pre-occupancy evaluation. The UASEM was adopted in a case study of a university campus project. The result indicated that this method has potential to improve users’ understanding of the design solutions, especially in terms of spatial properties of the layout. It can also improve users’ confidence to express comments and increase their willingness to collaboratively work with designers.

Research highlights► An activity scheduling method is presented to help users specify daily activities. ► User activity simulation model is built up based on building information model. ► Pre-occupancy evaluation is conducted based on user activity simulation model. ► A practical framework of implementing the UASEM is proposed. ► The USAEM can help users collaboratively work with designers.