Davide Schaumann, Seonghyeon Moon, Muhammad Usman, Rhys Goldstein, Simon Breslav, Azam Khan, Petros Faloutsos, Mubbasir Kapadia
Davide Schaumann, Seonghyeon Moon, Muhammad Usman, Rhys Goldstein, Simon Breslav, Azam Khan, Petros Faloutsos, Mubbasir Kapadia
Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design
2019
In recent years, simulation has been used to investigate the mutual relationship between buildings and their occupants while focusing on pedestrian movement, emergency egress, day-to-day occupancy, and energy use. Most of these efforts employ discrete-time simulation, where building and agent properties are constantly updated at fixed time steps to reflect the dynamics of people and buildings. The behavior of real-world occupants, however, involves a variety of decision-making patterns that unfold over different time scales and are often triggered by discrete events rather than gradual change. In working toward a platform supporting the full range of human activities in buildings, we embed a discrete-time occupant movement simulator called SteerSuite within a general-purpose discrete-event simulation framework called SyDEVS. With preexisting SteerSuite functions providing low-level steering behavior, and newly implemented SyDEVS nodes providing high-level planning behavior, the integrated prototype represents a multi-level and multi-paradigm approach to occupant simulation for building design applications.
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While traditional programming practices have produced a wide range of relatively independent simulation methods, predictive models of extremely complex natural and artificial systems will require a more scalable, more collaborative approach to modeling. This project strives for software that will help researchers develop, debug, document, share, and integrate simulation code.
Buildings are the largest consumers of energy responsible for 48% of all Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Due to the complexity and multidisciplinary aspects of architectural design, construction, urban design, and building occupant behavior, simulation has gained attention as a means of addressing this enormous challenge. The idea is to model a building’s many interacting subsystems, including its occupants, electrical equipment, and indoor and outdoor climate. With simulation results in hand, an architect is better able to predict the energy demand associated with various designs, and choose from among the more sustainable options.