CAD-Integrated Web-Based Building Performance Simulation Platform

Today’s building energy modeling practice is highly fractured between different simulation engines, Computer Aided Design CAD interfaces, and computing resources. While preferences for these fractured components vary between professions and individuals, one principle is unanimously agreed upon: a strong, flexible, and programmable connection between these three categories of software is needed if the building industry is to reach the full potential of building simulation to inform decisions. A robust connection between two of these three categories of software is presently supported through a plugin that Ladybug Tools developed to connect a popular CAD interface Grasshopper to several commonly used simulation engines Radiance, OpenStudio / EnergyPlus. While this plugin is successful in this respect and has been downloaded over 390,000 times, it is poorly integrated with the computing resources available in today’s world, which has placed clear limits on the scale and nature of simulations that can be run with it. Furthermore, the fact that the plugin has been limited to a single CAD environment on individual desktops means that the various parties of the building industry have faced challenges as they use it to collaborate on simulation inputs, outputs and logic. To address this situation, a webbased cloud computing platform is being built that connects to this plugin and offers a means of sharing simulation assets between team members as well as access to orders of magnitude more computing resources. As the only cloud computing platform to integrate across several simulation engines, it enables new webbased workflows that couple whole building energy simulation with daylight and detailed thermal comfort simulation as specified in topic 9c for wholebuilding energy modeling. Significant progress has been made during the initial Phase II period and it has become clear that the methods Ladybug Tools has developed for sending simulation assets to the cloud and scaling simulations to run with cloud computing resources are working as intended. During Phase IIA, critical tasks will be completed that are needed to make the platform suitable for collaboration across the different team members in the building simulation supply chain. The completion of two new CAD interfaces for Revit, the most popular Building Information Modeling software in the US, and Rhino, a popular CAD environment with geometric flexibility, will greatly expand the capability for architects to contribute simulation geometry to the platform. Completing a webbased viewer for simulation models will better enable engineers to QA/QC design models, validate properties assigned to geometry, and interpret results. A webbased “recipe builder” will allow experts to create custom simulation logic by linking together functions into scaleable workflows to be executed on the platform. Lastly, a customizable webbased data analytics dashboard is needed to involve managers, clients and the members of the building design process who ultimately make decisions based on the conclusions from simulation.