Simulation speedup techniques for computationally demanding tasks

The computational cost for the repeated evaluation of zonal-type building simulation models can be pro-hibitive especially in contexts, such as Building Opti-mization and Control Design, where repeated evalua-tion of the models — for different initial and bound-ary conditions — is required. In the present paper, two techniques to reduce simulation time are investi-gated: (i) geometry simplification for periodic geome-tries; and, (ii) the use of co-simulation to split a build-ing into simpler sub-buildings, that can be evaluated in parallel, exploiting the resources of multi-core compu-tational architectures. These simulation speed-up ap-proaches are evaluated, with respect to accuracy and computational effort, against the validated full-scale models of two real buildings.