Previous work involving literature review, simulation tool analysis and interviews with world leading building performance consulting engineers and designers has shown that building performance simulation (BPS) is mostly limited to code compliance checking of the final building design whilst it could provide useful information and guidelines throughout the entire design process [Hopfe et al., 2...

This thesis addresses the challenges of building a software system for general-purpose runtime code manipulation. Modern applications, with dynamically-loaded modules and dynamicallygenerated code, are assembled at runtime. While it was once feasible at compile time to observe and manipulate every instruction — which is critical for program analysis, instrumentation, trace gathering, optimizati...

A variety of applications have arisen where it is worthwhile to apply code optimizations directly to the machine code (or assembly code) produced by a compiler. These include link-time whole-program analysis and optimization, code compression, binaryto-binary translation, and bit-transition reduction (for power). Many, if not most, optimizations assume the presence of a control-flow graph (cfg)...

Many software systems adopt isolation mechanisms of modern processors as software security building blocks. Reasoning about these building blocks means reasoning about elaborate assembly code, which can be very complex due to the loose structure of the code. One way to overcome this complexity is providing the code with a more structured semantics. This paper presents one such semantics, namely...

A state-of-the-art integrated environment was created to study interaction among fire, structure and agent models in a fire evacuation from a typical office building. For the fire simulations NIST large-eddy simulation code Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) was used. The code is based on a mixture fraction model. FDS provided time resolved temperature, CO, CO2, soot distribution in the building. Th...

Analogy between the Microelectronics and Building industries is explored with the focus on design, commissioning and operation processes. Some issues found in the realisation of low energy buildings are highlighted and techniques gleaned from microelectronics proposed as possible solutions. Opportunities identified include: adoption of a more integrated process, use of standard cells, inclusion...

In this paper details about the results of a code-to-code validation procedure of an in-house developed building simulation model, called DETECt, are reported. The tool was developed for research purposes in order to carry out dynamic building energy performance and parametric analyses by taking into account new building envelope integrated technologies, novel construction materials and innovat...