Future weather scenarios significantly affect indoor thermal comfort, influencing people’s well-being and productivity at work. Thus, future weather scenarios should be considered in the design phase to improve a building’s climate change resilience for new constructions as well as renovations in building stock. As thermal comfort is highly influenced by internal and external thermal loads resulting from weather conditions and building usage, only a dynamic building performance simulation (BPS) can predict the boundary conditions for a thermal comfort analysis during the design stage. As the model setup for a BPS requires detailed information about building geometry, materials, and usage, recent research activities have tried to derive the required simulation models from the open BIM (Building Information Modeling) Standard IFC (Industry Foundation Classes). However, even if IFC data are available, they are often faulty or incomplete. We propose a template-based enrichment of the BPS models that assists with imputing missing data based on archetypal usage of thermal zones. These templates are available for standardized enrichment of BPS models but do not include the required parameters for thermal comfort analysis. This study presents an approach for IFC-based thermal comfort analysis and a set of zone-usage-based templates to enrich thermal comfort input parameters.

In building simulations, interoperability challenges in the model setup lead to severe manual efforts, which are addressed in related research by BIM-based processes using the open exchange format IFC. However, IFC-based approaches rarely incorporate computational fluid dynamics (CFD), crucial for detailed performance evaluations of local indoor environmental quality. The IFC-based CFD setup requires interior design details often not provided in IFC data, particularly in multi-purpose spaces where furniture layouts vary with usage. Therefore, we propose algorithms to automatically generate variable furniture setups for these spaces. Our algorithms are tested on a multi-purpose space and evaluated for indoor environmental quality. Our methods enhance the performance evaluation of air distribution and indoor thermal comfort in the design stage of buildings, supporting optimized, energy-efficient air system design.