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.

From the observation that existing simulation programs exploit neither the subjacent parallelism in building energy management problems nor parallel computer possibilities, we develop certain principles and apply them to a well-known program, TRNSYS.

The technique of field modelling is applied to predict the indoor air movement and convective heat transfer induced by thermal sources in big enclosures. This is achieved by solving a system of partial differential equations describing the conservation of momentum, enthaply and mass. The k-e model is used to describe the turbulent effect. The equations are discretized using finite difference method and solved by the Semi-Implict-Method-for Pressure-Linked-Equations-Revised (SIMPLER) scheme.

Increasing design standards within the building industry mean that some form of pre-construction testing of the building envelope is required. Expensive and time consuming field tests are becoming more impractical whereas the cost-effectiveness and greater flexibility of computer simulations will allow them to play an increasing role in building design. An expanding database of actual construction properties is needed to assist the use and advancement of existing models.

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.

Hot-2000 is a computer model which assists builders, engineers, and architects in the design and simulation of residential buildings for thermal effectiveness, passive solar heating, and the operation and performance of heating and cooling systems. Many of the basic heat loss algorithms were derived or adapted from the National Research Council of Canada's HOTCAN 3.0 program. Major additions and modifications have been made, mainly in the simulation of heating, ventilation and cooling systems. Weather data libraries are available for 76 Canadian locations and for 194 U.S. locations.

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.