Impact of Building Typology on Daylight Optimization Using Building Information Modeling: Apartments in Erbil City as a Case Study

Daylight represents one of the crucial factors that affect directly on the building performance and its occupants. This study assesses the daylight performance in the multi-storey residential buildings (apartments) in Erbil city. It aims to find out the impact of building typology on daylighting quality and quantity. The endeavour of this research is to determine the optimal plan typology in providing sufficient daylight levels. A simulation method has been used with an academic licensed Revit Architecture 2019 with plugged insight daylight analysis as one of Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools for achieving this goal. Five multi-storey residential buildings were selected as cases of study. Three types of simulation were run on each project: Illuminance, LEED, and Daylight Autonomy to achieve results. The results were analyzed and compared with daylight standards levels. The results demonstrated that the point typology is the best type of plans among all cases in terms of providing optimal daylight performance, while the double-loaded plan typology was the worst. The study concluded that the plan typology has an obvious impact on achieving daylight performance in the multi-storey residential buildings. The current research can contribute to identifying the shortcomings of daylight levels in buildings seeking to overcome it in the early phases of design. © 2019 The Author(s). Published by solarlits.com. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).