Keywords: energy-efficient design, life cycle simulation, virtual lab, computing system, civil engineering, ISES.

An important domain of energy and emission reduction is the phase of the planning of new buildings and facilities or their refurbished. Another important domain is the design of new products. Products are often not stand-alone objects but part of a host product, such as buildings or facilities. Therefore the most important domain is the design of new products, concurrently considering their own energy behaviour and their interaction with the host product, both in dedicated design cycles. For the energy-efficient design and operation of products the semantic contexts of several different disciplines need to be integrated; e.g. product development, building design and construction, and facility management.

Analysis of legacy ICT products revealed the following gaps in information and communication technologies for support of energy-efficient design and operation, including various interoperability issues between product (STEP) [1] and building design tools (BIM) [2], generalisation of energy profiles, etc. The objective of the EU project ISES (Intelligent Services for Energy-Efficient Design and Life Cycle Simulation) [3] is to address some of the identified gaps and to develop ICT building blocks to integrate, complement and empower existing tools for design and facility management to a Virtual Energy Lab. (VEL). This will allow evaluating, simulating and optimising the energy efficiency of products for built facilities and facility components in variations of real life scenarios before their realisation, acknowledging the stochastic life-cycle nature. The VEL will be configured as an ontology-controlled SOA system with distributed services, distributed modelling and analysis/simulation tools with distributed data sources. This will allow concentrating the research and development work on ICT gaps, whereas existing, market-proof services, tools and data sources can be easily integrated. The VEL will allow engineers and experienced architects to handle the complex analysis of the energy-efficient design of products and take efficient and informed decisions.

The paper addresses project requirements and early design considerations of the ISES Virtual Energy Lab. It also addresses the use of different information technologies used for the development of the VEL such as cloud computing [5] for scalability and resource management as well as a high-throughput computing environment to enable stochastic energy analyses.

1

N. Guarino, S. Borgo, C. Masolo, "Logical modeling of product knowledge: towards a well-founded semantics for STEP", Proceedings of the European Conference on Product Data Technology, Sophia Antipolis, France, 1997.

2

C. Eastman, P. Teicholz, R. Sacks, K. Liston, "BIM Handbook: A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers", Wiley, 2008.

3

Intelligent Services for Energy-Efficient Design and Life Cycle Simulation (ISES), ises.eu-project.info

4

P. Katranuschkov, R.J. Scherer, Z. Turk, "Intelligent services and tools for concurrent engineering: An approach towards the next generation of collaboration platforms", ITcon Vol. 6, Special Issue Information and Communication Technology Advances in the European Construction Industry, pp. 111-128, 2001, www.itcon.org/2001/9

5

J. Keith, N.L. Burkhard, "The Future of Cloud Computing: Opportunities for European Cloud Computing Beyond 2010", URL, 2010.

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