SimpleBuilding is a lightweight building performance simulation engine designed to predict the heating and cooling energy in multi-zone commercial buildings. It was designed based on the simplified, dynamic hourly method from ISO 13790:2009 and from Stephane Bertagnolio's PhD thesis.
Users should be cautioned that this engine is not as comprehensive as a complex whole building simulation program like EnergyPlus, as it is meant to simulate system level metrics of common types of buildings with common systems. It is an attempt to apply the Pareto Principle to building performance simulation through a transparent, open-source, scalable simulation engine written in the high-level, easy-to-learn Python scripting language.
The Engine is designed to be utilized through an IPython console. The easiest way to get started is to download the free Enthought Python Distribution (EPD) which includes all of the libraries required by the engine.
After installation of EPD, the pandas library will need to be upgraded to at least Version 0.90.
From the IPython console, navigate to the source code folder and run:
run -t SimpleBuildingEngine.py
This engine is in the beta phase and much of the input/output functionality common to building simulation engines is very crude and code-integrated.