Hey, thank you for visiting the survey results for Automation of Building Energy Simulation Workflow. An-Lei Huang and Xing Cheng conducted this survey in mid-June, 2017. We presented the survey results at the Building Simulation 2017 Conference and had a forum discussion with two guest speakers, Peter Ellis with Big Ladder Software and Weili Xu with Buildsimhub.
You might be curious about what motivated us to come up with this survey idea, and how we came up with the title of the session. As an energy analyst for the past two-and-half years, most of the time I was struggling with time-consuming, iterative (also known as copy and paste tasks). I was wondering if there were any techniques or tools that can improve the workflow or even solve problems. I started with writing Python to do simple parsing work for me. I felt fulfillment and I had more time to deal with problem solving.
Last year (2016) I attended the ASHRAE Building Performance Analysis Conference and heard Michael O’Keefe’s and Peter Ellis’ presentation about Model Like a Programmer. In the presentation, Michael told about the similarities between modelers and programmers and showed the benefits of applying scripting skills into the workflow. I was inspired by his session and after that I searched existing tools and scripts. There are many tools that already exist that have been created by pioneers in our industry who have been developing tools to help us reduce these iterative workflows.
Then the following questions I had, and I believe most of you have been thinking about the same questions, were, are most of us utilizing these tools in our workflow? Are most of us preparing our capabilities such as scripting and programming skills? Are our companies and communities ready for the trends and ready to support the needs (e.g., trainings or workshops)? To answer these questions, we need help from this community. Therefore, this was how the survey was born. Thankfully, we had over 70 responses. Thank you again for anyone who completed the survey.
In the survey, we grouped the questions into four categories, which are Automation, Scripting and Programming, Personal Development and Company Support. The Automation questions were to understand the current tool adoption rates in different modeling processes. The Scripting and Programming questions were to know about what the programming languages that people are using to write their scripts are, and what do they do with them? The Personal Development questions were surveying the barriers and advantages of learning programming. And the last category is Company Support: this is to know if these specific skills are supported by the companies.
This is the participants’ demographic information for our survey. We received a total of 73 responses. Over 50% of the participants are based in the US. And the rest of them are from Europe, South America, Oceania and Asia. In terms of the occupation, most of them are energy modelers or energy analysts. The second and third highest occupations were academic professionals and architects.