By John Gunstone

14 July 2017

The Passive Low Energy Architecture Conference (PLEA) is an annual event that brings a network of experts together for a discourse on sustainable architecture and urban design. Max Fordham engineer, John Gunstone reviews some of the speakers from across the event. This is the second in his series.

After a career in building performance simulation, Joe led with a bold statement – It doesn’t work!

Within the design stage of a building, modellers judge the buildings design intent and often make dubious assumptions into the anticipated use and performance characteristics. In reality buildings are dynamic, are driven by non-linear relationships and display stochastic behaviours.

He suggested that the only “true” simulation of building operation was “emulation”. Within this framework designers would model the building and “agents” would interact with these designs. These interactions would be monitored and would result in an anticipated energy use. This vision would rely on a shared and open simulation environment, where designers and modellers would not define performance characteristics but would simply submit designs to a common emulation environment for generic testing. Although not explicitly said, these agents would likely be borrowed from advances happening in AI.

Watch this space.

https://www.strath.ac.uk/staff/clarkejosephandrewprof/