IBPSA1991

The building design process, with all its inherent complexities, is still by and large regarded and conducted as a series of rather discrete sequential operations. The architect is responsible for generating the initial design concept which is then passed onto to the various engineering professionals for detail technical implementation. This fragmentized approach has often created solutions that only serve a limited range of specific requirements without due consideration for the integral programmatic and performance related implications of the project.

The Customer Systems Division at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) is developing materials to enhance the adoption of advanced electric technologies. Among in these materials are a number of software programs. COMTECH and CooLAiD are two of these programs, which allow technical and non- technical analysts to answer questions about advanced end?use technologies, energy impacts, and utility bills for individual customers. These programs require information about customer energy-use patterns, utility rates, equipment cost and performance and operating strategy.

The ever widening range of skills necessary for architectural design requires a specialisation of each player working together toward the same goal within a number of distributed tasks. Parallel to this dispersion of tasks, an information transfer must be established. This is rendered more important in tha the domains interest several actors simultaneously and that the process is situated in the early stages of design. Energy management for buildings is one of these tasks. It summons up at thee same time the architect and energy specialist.

Because every description formalism has advantages and disadvantages, a modelling platform for ODE/DAE systems allowing several formalisms would be required. MS1 is such a program and is described in this paper. Its development will start in August 1991 and will last three years. MS1 is based on an internal normalized formalism that is actually a mere topological representation of mathematical equation sets. we call that formalism information networks . computational causality is assigned after subsystem assembly and determines the assignment form to be used in each specific case.

The comparisson between measurements and simulations is a very important stage in the methodology for empirical whole model validation of building energy simulation programs developed within the PASSYS project. The aim of this paper is to describe and to evaluate several statistical tools that could be used for this purpose.

This paper describes a numerical whole-building optimization method that has been developed to optimize selected residential building envelope and equipment efficiency parameters, using life-cycle cost (LCC) as the optimization criterion. Details of the method are discussed, including the exploitation of special characteristics of the objective function, and its numerical implementation. The method is demonstrated by calculating optimal configurations for a typical single-family residence for a range of U.S. climates.

The development of an interface, which links two building simulation tools to a test version of a product model is discussed. The two simulation tools in hand can be regarded as representative members from the broad spectrum of building performance evaluation (BPE) tools: BFEP: a component-based program for the simulation of the temperature behaviour of buildings; SIBE: a program for calculating the solar irradiation in the built environment.

This paper deals with an optimal control algorithm which enables to regulate the heating installation of a building with discontinuous occupation. The control structure is based on the quadratic optimization principle. It seems to have several characteristics that are worth mentioning, in particular its simple calculating method and its easy installation. As opposed to the optimal control algorithms based on the minimum principle, the above-mentioned algorithm can be set up in microprocessors of very low capacity.

We describe the need for a joint effort between design researchers and simulation tool developers in formulating procedures and standards for integrating simulation into the building design process. We review and discuss current efforts in the US and Europe in the development of next- generation simulation tools and design integration techniques.

General continuous simulation of today is a handicraft mastered by a small group of experts. Systematic modelling techniques and supporting tools are beginning to emerge, promising access to advanced simulation also for less experienced users. Several ambitious projects around the world are at different stages of completion (e.g. EKS, SPANK, CLIM2000, SEE, HS1). These projects approach the task from widely different angles and the final products, once available, will offer a rich menu of alternatives.