Hello, Dru Crawley and Jon Hand are working on an update to the often quoted
Contrasting the Facilities of Building Simulation Programs report and this time
we are drilling down and expanding the review to include observations on how
practitioners actually make use of (and extend) the basic functionality in tools
as they are distributed to what works in their group.

My current focus is to extend the discussion about what-is-in the EnergyPlus
DataSets folder to include something about how practitioners currently manage
and access and QA entities that are in the DataSets folder. There are so many
possibilities as well as ways of painting-yourself-into-a-corner that would be
great to include beyond the dry contents facts.

I am looking for short stories about
a) how you find and merge into your models useful entities
b) how you might have added your own common resources into EnergyPlus
c) whether you did this 'manually' or made use of an interface or script to
do the heavy-lifting.

Our aim is to collect stories, edit it into a concise form and include it in
the comparison web site we are working on. Contributions can be treated
as anonymous if necessary., An email address is needed in case
we have some questions about submissions. Send to jon at esru.strath.ac.uk
and mention the tool version and the regional applicability.

As there are many front-ends for EnergyPlus we are also looking for how
other vendors leverage the files in the DataSets folder.

We will also be dealing with how folk deal with common data stores for
other simulation tools so this is also a call-out for best-practice and
found-myself-in-a-corner stories for simulation tools you work with.

Regards, Jon Hand, Glasgow Scotland