Guidance for the selection of a reduction technique for thermal models

A new method aimed at the selection of the best reduction technique for each given invariant linear system, such as those obtained when modelling the thermal behaviour of building envelopes, is presented here. The method can be divided into three main steps. In the first step, we evaluate a priori whether or not the selection of the reduction technique is critical knowing either the desired reduction order or either the level of accuracy required for the reduced model. In the second step, the reduced models are computed with the previously selected criterion and techniques. Finally, the computed reduced model are evaluated a posteriori and the best one is selected in the last step. This three step method is implemented in the Matlab Software package, and as been validated at GISE and at EDF.