Design and software architecture of a cloud-based virtual energy laboratory for energy-efficient design and life cycle simulation

Today, built facilities consume nearly 40% of the global energy and produce about 30% of CO2 emissions and solid waste. To decrease these rates, the evaluation, simulation and optimisation of energy efficiency of products for built facilities and facility components should be performed in various real-life scenarios before their actual use in practice. This paper presents a suggested Virtual Energy Laboratory where the involved multiple players can monitor the energy efficiency of a facility in all phases of the building life cycle by examining simultaneously various climatic, usage and design variations. To enable such simulation studies the Virtual Laboratory will provide for a huge number of parallel computations with varying simulation parameters from product data catalogues, climate data, user profiles and BIM model data using cloud technology. Moreover, it will also allow examining energy relevant product components like HVAC equipment or facade elements in different virtual building scenarios by simultaneously running simulations of the same component on different BIM data or climatic conditions. The paper describes the first steps of the Virtual Laboratory realisation including the developed principal software architecture and a first rapid prototype implementation. The presented work is done in the frames of the EU projects HESMOS (2010-13) and ISES (2011-2014).