Development Methodology of Web Crawling Based on Physical Properties DB of Building Materials for the Efficiency of Building Energy Simulation

Abstract

Simulation tools are actively used for various purposes of building energy analysis and evaluation and related research. Simulation tools provide built-in physical properties information of the building materials used in the building at the modeling stage to simulate the structure. However, this physical properties information database has practical usability problems such as diversity of measurement values, errors due to different unit values, and not covering new materials. Although such problems can be solved by accessing big data, there are not many studies on this way, and especially, there is no study on the physical properties of building materials. These problems can be solved by collecting actually measured physical properties of building materials, collecting physical properties information of website, and building a new database of building materials properties so this database is more diverse than the database embedded in the simulation tools and can be applied to diverse format of the simulation tools. The purpose of this study is to construct a web crawler based on Python language for effective use of simulation tools and to construct an information gathering algorithm for building new applicable material properties information. As a result of designing the data collection algorithm, it was able to automatically collect vast amounts of data on the website, filter unnecessary data, and convert it into a file of the applicable format. The result of this algorithm design can easily collect a large amount of data and apply it to the simulation tool, and it will be able to overcome the limitation of the database embedded in the simulation tools