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

[Jon Hand]

This is getting to be a good discussion.  On the ESP-r side there are many options for
getting complex patterns of occupancy, lights, equipment.  At one extreme you could
define for every minute of the year casual gains (occupants/lights/small power) for
one (or more) rooms in what we call a temporal file and read these in during the
simulation (or every 5 minutes or 10 minutes etc).

ESP-r has a (not-used-very-often) formal description of uncertainty so that you can
nominate portions of a model (e.g. the conductivity of brick on the south facade
or the size of a window) and say how uncertain you are about that and then direct
the simulation engine to run however many simulations are needed to explore the sensitivity
of predictions to changes in these parts of the model. There are a half dozen
formal statistical methods implemented so if you don't like a step-wise change you can use a
different approach.

What would be really nice would be to use a descriptive language that
implemented patterns of diversity overlayed onto the simplistic schedules that
most of us tend to use.  I think that SHOCC does this, but it
is a bit of a learning curve for practitioners.

-Jon Hand (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow)
________________________________________
________________________________________
From: bldg-sim-bounces at lists.onebuilding.org [bldg-sim-bounces at lists.onebuilding.org] On Behalf Of Paul Carey [paul at zed-uk.com]
Sent: 09 April 2010 15:49
To: 'holly wasilowski'; bldg-sim at lists.onebuilding.org
Subject: Re: [Bldg-sim] ESPr vs. E+ for occupant behavior research

Holly,

You can use an external file within a schedule to model say occupancy.  If you had data that told you the level of occupancy for each room for each hour of the day, etc then you can bring that file into the EnergyPlus model within a schedule for occupancy and hence it would allow you to model it exactly if necessary.  Then using the Parametric tools that E+ offers, you could then change a variable at a time (that would be my preference, even though you can do more than 1 at a time) to then work out the effects of those variances and the link to occupancy and effectiveness, etc.

ESP-r will probably run faster than E+ which will be useful if your models are large.  Both are difficult to work in.

Cheers
Paul




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From: bldg-sim-bounces at lists.onebuilding.org [mailto:bldg-sim-bounces at lists.onebuilding.org] On Behalf Of holly wasilowski
Sent: 09 April 2010 14:47
To: bldg-sim at lists.onebuilding.org
Subject: [Bldg-sim] ESPr vs. E+ for occupant behavior research

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