Software Components for Dynamic Building Simulation

This paper describes a standard of software components for building energy and control systems modeling. This technology is well positioned to overcome the limits of existing tools and to allow better collaboration between various engineering domains coexisting in building field. A standard named ICAr is proposed in addition to the Modelica approach to ensure models interoperability. So, the strengths and lacks of the “white box” modeling based on Modelica language will be firstly discussed in order to prove the necessity to introduce the ”black box” modeling based on software components and to highlight the complementarity of these two approaches via “plug’out” and “plug’ in” notions . As the white modeling was standardized by defining universal languages, this work proposes a norm of software component named ICAr. So, this paper defines the specifications of the ICAr standard: inputs, outputs and interfaces for external communication. Moreover, to demonstrate the importance of this approach in building performance simulation, a thermal envelope will be coupled to a simple heater model in different simulation environments using a mixed approach.