INTEROPERABILITY FORMAT TRANSLATION AND TRANSFORMATION BETWEEN IFC ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN FILE AND SIMULATION FILE FORMATS

Automatically translating a building architecture file format (Industry Foundation Class) to a simulation file, e.g., for EnergyPlus and/or Radiance, in one aspect, may comprise extracting from a building architecture file, data and metadata used by a target simulation tool; creating interoperability data objects and storing the extracted data in the interoperability data objects; preparing a model translation procedure to identify a mapping from a Model View Definition to a translation and transformation function; transforming the extracted data using the data stored in the interoperability data objects, an input Model View Definition template, and the translation and transformation function to convert the extracted data to correct geometric values needed for a target simulation file format used by the target simulation tool; and generating the simulation file in the target simulation file format.