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Why do Building Performance Simulation?

Because buildings are complex systems, no single discipline can fully understand or optimize them in isolation. The thermal behavior of a building depends on geometry, envelope properties, solar radiation, occupancy, controls, HVAC systems, moisture effects, and the surrounding environment. BPS provides a common framework in which these interacting phenomena can be analyzed together. This is why professionals and researchers from very different backgrounds use simulation: each discipline brings its own questions, assumptions, priorities, and performance criteria, but all benefit from a model-based understanding of building behavior over time.

Another reason BPS is relevant across disciplines is that modern building design is increasingly performance-driven. Regulations, energy targets, net-zero strategies, climate adaptation, indoor environmental quality, and life-cycle thinking all require more than static rules of thumb. They require evidence. BPS helps generate that evidence by testing alternatives before construction, identifying trade-offs, and revealing consequences that are difficult to see intuitively. Whether the goal is reducing cooling loads, sizing a ventilation system, minimizing overheating risk, improving daylight conditions, or evaluating control strategies, simulation turns design assumptions into quantifiable results.

In education and research, BPS also acts as a bridge between theory and practice. It allows students and professionals to connect abstract concepts with realistic building behavior. Heat transfer, airflow, equipment performance, occupancy effects, and weather conditions become visible as dynamic processes rather than isolated textbook equations. This makes BPS valuable not only as a technical design tool, but also as a learning environment for understanding buildings as integrated systems.

As a design tool, BPS can answer questions and explore design concepts, identify priorities, gain insights, challenge rules of thumb, track performance vs. targets etc. Some of the questions that may be answered by these design-focused analyses include

• the use of or the potential savings from sepcific systems (like natural ventilation, free cooling or passive solar heating, daylighting controls, external shading, electrical batteries, PV optimizers, active heat recovery, etc.)
• the optimal size of system components (as energy generators or ambient to air, ground to brine, water to room etc. heat exchangers).
• the fulfillment of requirements from building codes, standards, certification systems or even more ambitious targets.

In the following, we try to list and describe the most important types of BPS applications.

Contents

• Optimize building performance
• Dimensioning
• Proof of concept and sensitivity analysis
• Energy code compliance and certifications
• Research and policy development
• Digital twin for operating control and virtual sensing
  
  

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