Developing a methodology of simulating tree shading on daylight performance in indoor spaces such as lux levels on a task plane is investigated. The findings will be useful in improving design of lighting environments in public buildings such as office buildings or classrooms. The method used a camera that takes hemispherical images, positioned in the centre of the task plane. Boundary conditions need to be defined at the outset include the type and age of the trees, the type of the sky and turbidity, the orientation of the window, the time of the day, and the time of the year.

Optimizing the operations of a HVAC system in response to the dynamic loads and varying weather conditions throughout a year can result in substantial energy savings.  However, the problems related to HVAC system optimization are always discrete, non-linear and highly constrained. So, a simulation-based optimization approach for a HVAC system is proposed.

The present work reports an experimental procedure designed to verify a particular solution for the distri-bution of artificial light sources. The inverse method to illumination by optimization technique, IMIbyOP-TIM, is applied to generate an uniform field of illumi-nation as a result of the free location of purely diffuse light sources. A reduced scale enclosure is build to measure the effectiveness of the method on indoor en-vironments. The illumination field is observed over a work plane placed parallel to the floor and measured by photovoltaic sensors.

Heating and cooling load estimation is based on the heat balance method. Although this method has strong physical basis, it yields an acausal system when the heat capacity of the indoor space is non-negligible. New emergent problems in low energy buildings require time steps significantly smaller than 1 hour, which is usually used by simulation software. Therefore, when the time step tends to zero, the calculated load tends to infinity when the indoor air temperature has an incremental variation.