I am studying the impacts of occupant behavior on the success of various building technologies, such as natural ventilation, radiant ceilings, phase-change materials, automatic lighting controls, demand-controlled ventilation, etc. using whole building energy simulation.? I am wondering whether to use EnergyPlus or ESP-r.? An advantage of ESP-r seems to be the SHOCC module, which seems to offer a great deal of flexibility for manipulating occupant behavior, including stochastic processes.? However an advantage of EnergyPlus seems to be its extensive HVAC libraries so that I can actually model energy use instead of loads.? I am wondering if the EnergyPlus Runtime Language (ERL) (described in Ellis, Torcellini, Crawley 2007) would offer the opportunity for a similar level of occupancy control via simple programming.? I would appreciate any advice on the appropriateness of each software for this research.?
Thanks in advance!
Holly
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Holly Wasilowski