With the growing need for digital approaches in project planning and management, the past decade has witnessed a significant rise in the adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) which is now expanding into numerous professional fields. In the power engineering, there has been a steady increase in the use of cable systems for the electric power transmission, where the proper dimensioning of such systems is essential to ensure their reliable and efficient operation. Although several dedicated software solutions for cable dimensioning are available on the market, most do not offer a direct integration with the BIM tools. The paper investigates the possibility of linking a BIM model of a high-voltage cable system with a program developed in the FreeFEM environment, an open-source software tool for numerical solving thermal states using the finite-element method. The connection between the BIM model and FreeFEM systems is enabled using the Python programming language that employs the open-source IfcOpenShell library. Thermal analysis of the cable system was compared with the results of dedicated commercial cable dimensioning program. The final part of our paper presents a practical case study of selecting an appropriate power cable based on a real-world engineering example. Using a custom-developed interface, the BIM model can be effectively integrated or linked with any specialized program for calculating the cable thermal states. Our analysis of the impact of various factors on the power cable installation confirm that the obtained results are highly comparable to those generated by dedicated software tools, thereby validating the accuracy and applicability of our approach.
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