[Bldg-sim] ESPr vs. E+ for occupant behavior research

[holly wasilowski]

I am studying the impacts of occupant behavior on the success of various building technologies, such as natural ventilation, radiant ceilings, phase-change materials, automatic lighting controls, demand-controlled ventilation, etc. using whole building energy simulation.  I am wondering whether to use EnergyPlus or ESP-r.  An advantage of ESP-r seems to be the SHOCC module, which seems to offer a great deal of flexibility for manipulating occupant behavior, including stochastic processes.  However an advantage of EnergyPlus seems to be its extensive HVAC libraries so that I can actually model energy use instead of loads.  I am wondering if the EnergyPlus Runtime Language (ERL) (described in Ellis, Torcellini, Crawley 2007) would offer the opportunity for a similar level of occupancy control via simple programming.  I would appreciate any advice on the appropriateness of each software for this research.  
Thanks in advance!
Holly
 
Holly Wasilowski
Doctoral Student in Sustainable Design
Harvard Graduate School of Design


      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.onebuilding.org/pipermail/bldg-sim-onebuilding.org/attachments/20100409/21f04860/attachment.htm>