A building control oriented simulation architecture

Poorly functioning and tuned control systems are a frequent source of building underperformance. Simulation can be an excellent method to study building controls, but a number of practical obstacles often interfere. The mapping of control functions—from a physical control system to a simulation model—is often error prone and contains gross simplifications. A major reason for this is that many simulation tools simply do not support modeling of realistic controls. However, even with a simulator that does allow complex controls, the practical mapping of actual to simulator supported control mechanisms is non-trivial, especially when addressing building or zone level supervisory controls typically embedded in building management systems (BMS) or room controllers. This paper proposes a simulation architecture that will help overcome some of these problems. It attempts to standardize some trivial choices, so that at least these will not lead to unnecessary complications and misunderstandings in this critical and error prone issue. The control concepts are collected from real building controls, and a simulation model that incorporates these is developed to prove the applicability in a whole-building, full-year simulator context.