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Rationale 

Healthcare buildings and districts are among the top EU priorities for Energy-efficient Buildings (EeB) since they play a key factor for a sustainable community, but their energy use and carbon emission are among the highest of all building types. A hospital –which is a part of a healthcare district– uses 2.5 times more energy than an office in average. There are some 15,000 hospitals in the EU responsible for at least 5% of the annual EU’s carbon emission (~ 250 million tonnes). Healthcare accounts for nearly 10% of EU’s GDP, and hospitals can take up to 60% of a country’s health expenditure (source: WHO and European Hospital and Healthcare Federation, 2012 statistics).

In order to cope with the energy, financial, political, societal and environmental crises, all healthcare districts in Europe are urgently seeking to substantially reduce their energy consumption and carbon emission by 30–50%. Therefore, they are planning new energy-efficient building projects as well as energy-efficiency retrofitting of the existing buildings. At present and in the near future, clients, architects, technical designers, contractors, and end-users really need a breakthrough in designing energy-efficiency buildings integrated in the healthcare districts.

The critical bottleneck is the inadequacy of the existing design methodologies to create holistic Energy-efficient Building (EeB) solutions for newly designed and retrofitted buildings in healthcare districts. Considering the complexity of EeB design, both holistic and systematic approaches are crucial in order to achieve the project’s goal. STREAMER will resolve this by optimising Semantics-driven Design methodologies with interoperable tools for Building and Geo Information Modelling (Semantic BIM and GIS) to validate the energy performance during the design stage. Once completed, STREAMER, will enable designers, contractors, clients and end-users to integrate EeB innovations for: 1. building envelope and space layout; 2.medical, MEP and HVAC systems; and 3. building and neighbourhood energy grids.

Streamer results will be validated in the 4 real projects involving the Implementers Communities. The outcome will be used to extend the standardisation in EeB design and operation, open BIM-GIS (IFC-CityGML), and Integrated Project Delivery (IPD).