Mapping Hvac Systems for Simulation In EnergyPlus

For building energy simulation tools to be accessible to designers, tool interfaces should present a conventional view of HVAC systems to the user, and then map this view to the internal data model used in the tool. The paper outlines a process that enables design engineers to create HVAC system representations using industry standard terminology and system, icon and typological representations and convert that unified representation into the format required by the whole building energy simulation tool EnergyPlus. This paper describes each stage of the conversion process, which involves transformations between the following representations: 1) engineer's representation, 2) component connectivity representation, 3) representation in the internal data model used in the Simergy graphical user interface for EnergyPlus, and 4) EnergyPlus representation.

The paper also describes mappings between these representations and the development of a rule-based validation and assignment framework required to implement that mapping. In addition, the paper describes the implementation of this process in Simergy.