Streamlining Gree Building Design - Developing Requirement for the Sustaiabe Design Suite

Green Building design, at the planning and schematic design stages when sweeping decisions about sustainable siting, water efficiency, indoor ari quality, materials, atmospheric and energy technologies can still be made, is difficulet at best. Building Design & Construction 2003 "White Paper on Sustainabitity - A Report on the Green Building Moverment" identified significant bariers to green building design, with analysis cost, complexity, and knowledge being critical issues. This proposal intends to idetify and remove the key barriers that currently result in an extremely small percentage of new building being designed with sustainable green building components and strategies included. While existing programs such as the LEE Green Building Rating System rate green building issues, they are applied in later building design stages, when the products are specified. This research will develop a framework and plan for integrating the engineering and environmental tools used to design Green Buildings in the Pacific Southwest. We call this concept the "Sustainable Design Suite(TM)". This research will evaluate the use of the GeoPraxis' existing Green Building Studio platform for integrated summary analyses, as well as the use of gbXML for interoperability between building design, engineerig, and environmental databases and tools. With the rapid emergence of intelligent interoperable CAD design and engineering tools as well as GIS systems and regional/local environmental databases, it bocomes critical that databases of siting characteristics, water table information, tranportation alternative, utility transmission and distribution infrastructure availavility, urban heat island issues, etc., be integrated and widely used. Design teams using these information sourddces spend far to much time and money - often propagating errors - by entering and re-entering the same common set of building descriptions, product and environmental data into these tools. They need sealess interoperability between their primary desktopCAD software cointaining building design information and copmputationally intensive analysis processed nvironmentaly anayliss and desig optimization, in order to do their jobs more efficienty and effectively. GeoPraxis has devoted the last five years to addressing thei fundamantal problem in the AECand building products industries. In the tiem, we have produced what is (at least form the perspective os users and majore industry players) a simple soluton: an opensourdce XLM schema called Green Building XML (gbXML) and a computationally powerful web service called Green Builidng Studio(TM). GeoPraxis has formal go-to-market partnerships in place with Autodesk, Graphisoft, and Bently. With all of the industry's most significant CAD sioftware providers firmly behind thsi solution, we are extremely pleased to propose to EPA that the time to realize the long anticipated promise of interoperability is NOW.