A CAD-Based System for Air-Conditioning in Buildings

Existing simulation tools related with energy analysis in buildings are not flexible enough and the aount of training time required to reach high proficiency is beyond the resources of most design studios. This paper describes the present on-going development of a general energy simulation tool called Graph-Base. The priority target is the automation of input data addressed to energy efficiency and associated analysis in buildings. Therefore, a more user-frindly "front-end" is now being proposed and presented using a hierarchical database structure through a commercially available CAD environment. By means of a brief description of its architecture and concepts, some aspects of an application in a real building performance evaluation context are shown.