1DESIGNER ORIENTATED PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF BUILDINGS

The objective of the work presented in this paper is to develop a building performance assessment tool that will assist the design process rather than be aimed at giving endorsement to a completed design. The paper discusses the concepts behind the on-going development of this new assessment tool. To effectively place it into the designer’s hand, this tool is self-contained – the simulation programs are directly linked to the assessment modules. Its features also include: (1) an interface for entering the input, (2) a module for automatically generating the reference building, (3) changeable databases, (4) validated calculation engine, (5) a user-accessible assessment-criteria module, and (5) presentations of the assessment results