Examination of Reduced Order Building Models with Different Zoning Strategies to Simulate Larger Non-Residential Buildings Based on BIM as Single Source of Truth

Abstract

Non-residential buildings are accountable for 11% of global energy-related CO2 emissions (United Nations Environment Programme 2018). To increase the performance in this sector, Building Energy Performance Simulation (BEPS) is one feasible approach. Therefore, there is need for reliable and fast simulation models. One feasible approach are so called Reduced Order Models (ROMs). Thus in this paper, a comparison between the results of the established BEPS tool EnergyPlus and a ROM in Modelica with a reduced number of resistances and capacities is applied at the use case of a non-residential building. A self-developed toolchain was used to create equal models for ROM and EnergyPlus based on the same Building Information Modeling (BIM) model. The comparison shows that the reduced model deviates by 10%in annual heating and cooling. To increase accuracy and decrease computational effort the zoning strategy of non-residential buildings is investigated. The investigation shows that using a suitable zoning approach can reduce the computational effort by up to 97 %.