One of the major impediments to the effective implementation of energy codes is the lack of user-friendly compliance tools and, in particular, compliance tools that make available to the designer all of the design flexibility found in the code. In most energy codes based on ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-1989, designers may use either prescriptive, system performance, or energy cost budget methods for demonstrating compliance. Recent progress in graphical user-interface and object-oriented programming techniques offer the possibility to unify all the above compliance methods and develop a software environment that can support a database of compliance rules, calculation procedures, and building descriptions. This approach will allow the designer to start with the simplest prescriptive method and, if necessary, progressively enable features that offer greater design flexibility up to a full whole-building performance method. This paper will present an analysis of software requirements for (1) unifying the compliance methods, (2) object-oriented representation of the building model, and (3) user-interface features. In addition, example usage scenarios from a compliance tool under development, which embodies these concepts, will be presented.

Authors: Krishnan Gowri, Ph.D., P.E., Robert S. Briggs, Linda M. Connell
Citation: IAQ and Energy 98 Using ASHRAE Standards 62 and 90.1 Conference Papers
Keywords: October, Louisiana, 1998