Overcoming the current shortcomings of tools to estimate building energy retrofitting performance

Identifying the best energy retrofitting option can be a challenging task for the building owner. While a lot of detailed simulation tools exist that can provide accurate calculations about the building energy consumption for the retrofitting comparison, the usability and complexity of these tools limit the usage for proficient building modelers, and the active working time required reduces even from them the possible number of retrofitting options that can be calculated. By simplifying the manual work and providing automated model calibration and generation processes, the results can be offered to a wider audience or even scanned through the most effective cases from a large building stock. We describe here BEYOND—an advanced retrofitting decision support tool that utilizes simple and automated workflow, keeping the results still accurate and transparent by utilizing building performance-measured data.