Trends in Smart Buildings Meeting, January 2009

I just realized how late I was with a summary of our last Trends meeting, which we held on Tuesday January 27th at LESO. So here follow my distant recollections of the event.

There were only three of us this time, but David was so kind as to give us a nice demo of the IDA simulation tool. He walked us through a typical use of the software, which apparently runs only on Windows. You basically use the provided GUI to build the model of your building, but IDA can also import from CAD tools.

From this model, IDA then builds a mathematical model of your simulation. From what I understood, it generates all the equations required to simulate the model, e.g. all the thermal nodes with their U-values etc. From there on the model is ready to run.

Running the simulation on a commodity PC took about 1 minute for 30 simulated days. Apparently IDA is unable to take advantage of multi-cores, so while it was running only one core was shown as busy.

You can also implement your own logic that should run along the simulation by embedding C code inside the NMF code generated by IDA. David showed us how he implemented a fuzzy logic controller running inside of IDA, implemented in C.

I had a good impression of IDA’s capabilities, especially the extensibility part. I am however a little bit put off by the fact that it runs only on Windows and is apparently not multithreaded. But that aside I think it is a neat tool.