“The first jointly organized conference held in 2014 was a huge success in its ability to bring to the building energy analysis and performance simulation community together and provide the conference content to serve attendees,” said Dennis Knight, conference chair. “The ASHRAE and IBPSA-USA SimBuild 2016 conference seeks to build upon that success and further improve the industry’s ability to accurately model building performance.”

Modelers, software developers, owners, and researchers will address the practices of energy modeling and building performance simulation using existing simulation tools, software development, and future simulation research and applications.

The conference seeks papers on the following topics:

• Energy efficiency

• HVAC component modeling and load analysis

• Urban scale modeling

• Lighting and daylighting

• Combined use of tools

• Co-simulation

• Optimization

• Algorithm advances

• Computational fluid dynamics

• Data exchange and interoperability

• Energy auditing

• Life cycle cost and economic analysis

• Model calibration and validation

• Automation and scripting

• Modeling of tall buildings

• Weather data for modeling

• Occupant comfort

• Heat, air, moisture modeling

• Uncertainty analysis

• Big data applications for large scale simulations

• Reality capture for modeling

• Data visualization and user experience

 In addition, papers describing workarounds, case studies, how to, challenges, barriers, and cloud-based solutions are encouraged.

Abstracts (400 or less words in length) are due Oct. 16, 2015. If accepted, papers are due Jan. 15, 2016. The conference papers will be a maximum of eight pages in length.

To submit an abstract or for more information, visit www.ashrae.org/simbuild2016.

A call for presenters will be announced after the call for papers closes. Invited speakers and keynote speakers will be announced.

The conference will cover two-and-a-half days and will be preceded by two days of training seminars and short courses.

“The conference seeks to keep pace with advances in computing, data, and automation as well as to help modelers make better decisions through the application of simulation and modeling over the entire building life cycle,” Knight said.