TESTING AND VALIDATION OF ANEW BUILDING ENERGY SIMULATION PROGRAM

摘要

Formal independent testing has been an integralrncomponent in the development of EnergyPlus, a newrnbuilding energy simulation program. Testing to daternhas included analytical, comparative, sensitivity,rnrange, and empirical tests. Published test suites whichrninclude reference results have been applied as muchrnas possible in order to take advantage of the effortsrnof others to develop well-defined, reproducible tests.rnThe results to date show good agreement with wellestablishedrnsimulation tools such as DOE-2.1E,rnBLAST, and ESP. Several testing utilities have beenrndeveloped to help automate the task of assuring thatrneach new version of the software is still performingrnproperly. Selected test results are presented alongrnwith lessons learned.