icccbe 2010 © Nottingham University Press Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in Civil and Building Engineering W Tizani (Editor) Abstract Advances in information and communication technologies [ICTs] offer the opportunity to improve the way energy profiling tools and techniques are used to measure and inform the energy performance of buildings throughout their lifecycle. The exploitation of this potential is one of the goals of a current EU FP7 funded project, entitled “IntUBE - Intelligent Use of Buildings’ Energy Information. The overall aim of the project is to improve the energy performance of new and existing buildings via the intelligent use of buildings' energy information. The focus of this paper is on the tools being developed within this project to inform the design process. Its main aim is to illustrate how current building design and assessment tools can be integrated with an environmental assessment trade-off tool to support design decisions at both the conceptual and early phases of building design. To do so the paper presents a discussion of the functionality of the tools and techniques currently being developed, which illusrates how it can be used to support improved building design, with regard to the inclusion of renewable energy technologies, passive solar techniques, building internal layout and sustainable construction materials. Keywords: sustainable building design, building simulation 1 Introduction The overarching aim of the IntUBE project is to improve building energy performance in new and existing buildings, via the intelligent use of buildings' energy information. The research conducted in this project will to contribute to the development of “virtual (collaborative) ‘life-cycle’ building tools that simulate actual buildings and their construction coupled with intelligent systems that monitor and archive design intent and performance and feed the results back to the simulation tools, which, in turn, grow more refined through integrating better empirical data” (Mills 2004). The approach taken will support the development of building models to inform the energy performance of buildings throughout their lifecycle. The main functions of the energy-profiling component of the IntUBE system are to capture a buildings dynamic behaviour and use this information to improve building design, control, maintenance, and retrofit strategies. This will be achieved by the development of energy enabled building models, the complexity of which will vary according to the life cycle stage of the target building. These models will enable the production of simulated energy profiles for a building that can be used to produce repositories of simulated building and systems performance, the complexity of which will also vary according the buildings lifecycle. The system will use analyses of the simulations of a buildings’ energy performance recorded in the IntUBE repositories to identify building design, maintenance, retrofit, and control strategies. However, the focus of this paper is on Energy profiling: supporting performance based approaches in sustainable building design Tracey Crosbie, Nashwan Dawood, Eugene Loh & Saad Dawood Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK