IISABRE - AN INTEGRATED BUILDING SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT

An integrated building simulation environment, IISABRE, is introduced. IISABRE consists of CABD, BTP and IISPAM. CABD is an AutoCAD-based bu ilding descriptor enabling users to draw a building and define informa tion. Some design tools are built into CABD, and a STEP-based building database can be generated, which provides an open mechanism to share the building database with other programs. BTP is a program for the de tailed dynamic simulation of building thermal performance. With a PC 4 86DX50 (8M RAM) running in MS-Windows 3.11, BTP needs about 40 minutes to calculate the annual hourly energy demand for a building with 20 z ones. IISPAM is a knowledge-based system for translating the STEP-base d building database into ASCII-based data files for BTP. IISABRE can b e widely employed in the field of building environmental engineering i n order to improve the energy efficiency of buildings and the thermal comfort of the indoor environment. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.