Automation of Building Energy Performance Simulation with IDA ICE

Abstract: Buildings play a central role for livability and carbon footprint of urban areas. Ambitious energy saving and emission reduction targets created a need for a new generation of decisionsupport methods and tools that allow for detailed analysis of urban energy on a large scale. Urban building energy modeling (UBEM) that has emerged recently is an efficient approach to assess energy performance of multiple buildings and system effects from urban energy interventions. However, the further upscale of UBEMs is significantly limited due to the lack of automation for building energy performance (BEP) simulations required for such models in large amounts. This thesis aimed to explore challenges for automation of BEP simulations, and to develop a prototype tool that would serve as a middleware between UBEM and BEP simulation engine, focusing on the IDA ICE simulation software. The result of this thesis is icepy — a tool for automation of BEP simulations in IDA ICE. It uses IDA ICE API and Lisp scripting to provide interaction between UBEM process and IDA ICE in order to generate initial simulation model (IDM), execute simulation and manage results in an automated way. Being implemented as a Python package, it allows to modify multiple IDMs or export simulation results with a few lines of code. The developed tool has been tested and validated for the case building in Minneberg, Stockholm. The automation capabilities provided by icepy has allowed to perform sensitivity analysis for building design parameters as was demonstrated for the window-to-wall ratio (WWR) and three various algorithms for window distribution. The resulting tool has limited functionality as it addressed building envelopes which is only one component of building simulation. However, it has proved to be an efficient approach to automate simulation process and has shown a good potential for further development of such tools.