“The practical application of modeling buildings includes a broad range of professional services requiring an equally broad range of expertise, knowledge, skills, and tools. This call for presentations addresses these practitioner needs,” said Dennis Knight, conference chair.

According to ASHRAE, modeling is useful throughout a building’s life cycle from analyzing individual elements and assemblies at the beginning stages of design through measuring the performance of a building after it is constructed and using calibrated models to improve performance. 

While energy may be the single-most highly visible form of modeling, it is clear that practitioners face many other requirements, such as occupant comfort (acoustics, thermal, and visual), indoor environmental quality, sustainability, resilience, life safety, system design, component selection, documentation, code compliance, utility incentives analysis, and building performance rating and labeling programs, to name a few.

“This expanded scope of work facing modelers combined with integrating tools like BEM and SIM with BIM describe the challenges facing practitioners today. Through the call for presenters and invited speakers, the conference aims to provide ways to address these common concerns.”

With a goal to address the lifecycle of buildings, the overall theme for the conference is “Using Simulation to Improve Building Performance from Planning and Design to Construction, Operations and Retrofit."

The conference seeks practical application presentations on the following building modeling topics:

• Energy efficiency

• HVAC component modeling and load analysis

• Urban scale modeling

• Lighting and daylighting

• Optimization

• Computational fluid dynamics

• Data exchange and interoperability

• Energy auditing

• Life cycle cost and economic analysis

• Model calibration and validation

• Automation and scripting

• Weather data for modeling

• Occupant comfort

• Heat, air, moisture modeling

• Uncertainty analysis

• Big data applications for large scale simulations

• Standards, organization, best practices and workflow for BEM and SIM

• Documenting existing conditions in BIM using photographs, laser scans, and point clouds for use in BEM and SIM applications

Modelers, software developers, architects, engineers, building owners, and other practitioners are invited to submit presentation proposals on these topics. Presentations addressing case studies, workflow and process, cloud-based solutions, and challenges and work arounds are encouraged.

“These presentations should address the practices of building modeling using existing tools,” Knight said.

Abstracts (400 or less words in length) and a 100-word promotional abstract are due Feb. 3, 2016.  Papers are not required for accepted presentation proposals.

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