Towards an IFC-Modelica Tool Facilitating Model Complexity Selection for Building Energy Simulation

This paper presents a novel tool chain that enables a direct coupling between building information models (BIM) and building energy simulation (BES) models developed in Modelica. In contrast to similar tools found in literature, the novel tool chain is a Python implementation that provides a direct coupling between BIM and Modelica and focuses on the thermal modelling of building envelopes. The main innovation in this tool chain is that it provides increased user flexibility by facilitating a BES model generation with different levels of complexity, which is demonstrated on a real-life experiment. In this case study, significant savings in simulation time were obtained without significantly affecting the model accuracy in terms of predicting energy use and load-duration curves, if the aggregation of zones reflects the control strategy for space heating.status: publishe