Two French building energy programs were developed by the French utility company. The first one is intended to produce economic studies and be used as a research tool. The second one is more dedicated to engineering offices as a tool adapted to their constraints in thermal studies. To give confidence to the end-users and to ensure the quality of the software programs results, a validation procedure has been in place for many years. In Part 1, we presented the use of analytical tests with the first software. In this part, we focus on the empirical validation work proposed by the French team in the framework of a project led by an international organization dealing with energy savings. A new approximation based on parameter estimation methods has been proposed for purposes of modeling error diagnosis. It has been tested in providing a diagnosis to discrepancies between simulations and measurements in an actual building and has proved to be very efficient.

Units: SI