EnergyPlus: creating a new-generation building energy simulation program

Many of the popular building energy simulation programs around the world ar e reaching maturity - some use simulation methods land even code) that orig inated in the 1960s. For more than two decades, the US government supported development of two hourly building energy simulation programs, BLAST and D OE-2. Designed in the days of mainframe computers, expanding their capabili ties further has become difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. At the sa me time, the 30 years have seen significant advances in analysis and comput ational methods and power - providing an opportunity for significant improv ement in these tools. In 1996, a US federal agency began developing a new building energy simulat ion tool, EnergyPlus, building on development experience with two existing programs: DOE-2 and BLAST. EnergyPlus includes a number of innovative simul ation features - such as variable time steps, user-configurable modular sys tems that are integrated with a heat and mass balance-based zone simulation - and input and output data structures tailored to facilitate third party module and interface development. Other planned simulation capabilities inc lude multizone airflow, and electric power and solar thermal and photovolta ic simulation. Beta testing of EnergyPlus began in late 1999 and the first release is scheduled for early 2001. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rig hts reserved.