A Parametric Tool for Community-scale Modeling

Community-scale modeling is a rapidly growing area of interest for planners, policy makers, and researchers. There are, however, few software tools that enable large-scale parametric studies of communities based on detailed energy models of buildings. This paper presents a tool called Params-NZP for automatically generating and running full EnergyPlus models for the parametric analysis of entire communities. Params-NZP has been developed as one component of a larger framework called the NZP Tool. Created by the US Army Corps of Engineers as a decision-making aid for Army planners and energy managers, the NZP framework provides a web-based graphical interface that allows users to model energy, water, and waste scenarios for hundreds of buildings at Army bases and installations. Such installations accommodate communities with typical populations between 10,000 to 50,000 residents. The NZP framework interfaces with Params-NZP using XML input and output files. Params-NZP itself is composed of a command-line application manager, a generalized parametric template program called Params, a “Net Zero” (NZ) template library for EnergyPlus, and a collection of prototype building models. The prototypical building models include 14 Army building types, 16 commercial building types, and 4 residential building types.