A comprehensive approach to modeling and evaluating the visual environment in buildings

This paper describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a computational tool for the comprehensive support of the lighting design process. The factors which are determined to be critical for this purpose, and which this study attempts to address, include a) consistent, coherent and first principles based underlying algorithms, b) the detailed modeling of the contextual parameters such as the sky and site conditions, c) provision of evaluation support for interpreting the computed data, d) the provision of active design support to explore the relationships between the design variables and the performance indices, and e) integration with other building performance simulation tools to encourage the exploration of inter-relationships between the energy aspects of lighting, thermal comfort, HVAC systems, and passive heating and cooling.