Simulation, no problem, of course we offer this service! (observations on firms who have worked to make this true)

The paper focuses on the practical experiences of a number of professional firms striving to use simulation to deliver information of value to their clients. It exposes issues such as limitations in existing working practices and the mismatch between language routinely used by facilitators and trainees as well as their different expectations. The paper also discusses the differences observed between incremental implementation of simulation within practices and firms who wished to "jump in at the deep end". Lastly, it addresses the dilemma of how to move simulation tools into the already busy schedules and overloaded programmes of design practices successfully

Business success through process based application of simulation

Progressive design practices are increasingly cognisant of the potential of building energy simulation to assist the delivery of energy efficient, sustainable buildings. However, the success of any building performance assessment hinges on the capabilities of the tool; the collective competences of the team formed to apply it; and, crucially, the existence of an in-house framework within which simulation can be applied with confidence (McElroy and Clarke 1999). There is also a need for the professions to set up mechanisms that facilitate dialogue with vendors in order to influence tool capabilities. And on the related issues of building an in-house competency and a framework for application, the two core issues facing the professions are: i) a need for the development of in-house procedures for management of simulation; and ii) quality assurance of the related models and appraisal results

Gaining confidence in models of experiments in existing buildings

Describes a method for gaining confidence in models of experiments in existing buildings

Impact of including pre-defined object on high resolution assessments

Many simulation teams create models of empty buildings e.g. without the thermophysical and visual artefacts which are observed in the built environment or with highly abstract representations. This paper explores the impact of including explicit representations of furniture and fittings on multi-domain assessments vis-à-vis environmental control response, support for comfort and visual assessments and model clarity. Typically increasing model resolution is a tedious process and added detail if included, may not be fully utilised. The concept of pre-defined entities, which include visual form, explicit thermophysical composition, IESNA light distributions and mass flow attributes has been introduced in ESP-r. ESP-r facilities for calculating view-factors and insolation distributions have been updated to include this extended data model. Issues related to creating and managing such entities is discussed and the impacts quantified via case studies

Screening of energy efficient technologies for industrial buildings' retrofit

This chapter discusses screening of energy efficient technologies for industrial buildings' retrofit

Delivering building simulation information via new communication media

Often, the goal of understanding how the building works and the impact of design decisions is hampered by limitations in the presentation of performance data. Contemporary results display is often constrained to what was considered good practice some decades ago rather than in ways that preserve the richness of the underlying data. This paper reviews a framework for building simulation support that addresses these presentation limitations as well as making a start on issues related to distributed team working. The framework uses tools and communication protocols that enable concurrent information sharing and provide a richer set of options for understanding complex performance relationships

Contrasting the capabilities of building energy performance simulation programs

For the past 50 years, a wide variety of building energy simulation programs have been developed, enhanced and are in use throughout the building energy community. This paper is an overview of a report, which provides up-to-date comparison of the features and capabilities of twenty major building energy simulation programs. The comparison is based on information provided by the program developers in the following categories: general modeling features; zone loads; building envelope and daylighting and solar; infiltration, ventilation and multizone airflow; renewable energy systems; electrical systems and equipment; HVAC systems; HVAC equipment; environmental emissions; economic evaluation; climate data availability, results reporting; validation; and user interface, links to other programs, and availability

FutureGRID: A Program for long-term research into GRID systems architecture

Proceedings of the 2003 UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, 31st August - 3rd September, Nottingham UKThis is a project to carry out research into long-term GRID architecture, in the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and the Cambridge eScience Center, with support from the Microsoft Research Laboratory, Cambridge. It is part of a larger vision for future systems architectures for public computing platforms, including both scientitic GRID and commodity level computing such as games, peer2peer computing and storage services and so forth, based on work in the laboratories in recent years into massively scaleable distributed systems for storage, computation, content distribution and collaboration[26]

Adoption of dynamic simulation for an energy performance rating tool for Korean residential buildings : EDEM-SAMSUNG

Currently, there is a high emphasis on reducing the energy consumption and carbon emissions of buildings worldwide. Korea is facing an emerging issue of energy savings in buildings in perspective of new green economic policy. In this context, various policy measures including the energy efficiency ratings for buildings are being implemented for domestic and non-domestic buildings. In practice, design teams tend to prefer easy to use assessment tools to optimise energy performance and carbon ratings while they are concerned about calculation accuracy and the accurate representation of the dynamics involved associated with the characteristics of Korean residential buildings. This paper presents an assessment tool, named ‘EDEM-Samsung’ that aims to address these challenges for Korean residential apartments, which often encounter complex design issues. EDEM-Samsung is a tool that enables users to make rapid decisions identifying the effect of design parameter changes on energy and carbon ratings with an effective user interface and without compromising accuracy. This paper describes the architecture and functionalities of the tool, and the advantages offered to Korean designers

Opportunities and constraints in the use of simulation on low cost ARM-based computers

Abstract The whole-building simulation community has habitually demanded greater computational resources and developers and researchers have responded with a myriad of approaches to address this demand. However, much of the work of creating and evolving models takes a fraction of the available computational power. This paper considers the deployment of simulation at the other extreme of computational cost e.g. ARM based products such as the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone Black. This paper reports on the porting of the ESP-r whole-building suite to ARM. It describes the modifications required to the simulation software as well as to the compilation tool-chain and computing environment to support compilation and deployment. It discusses the performance implications of model complexity and adjustments to methodologies required as well as the user reactions. It also describes how research based on tools such as MATLAB can be hosted on these alternative computer platforms