[esp-r] Summary of March ESP-r developers workshop

[Jon Hand (clcv10)]

Here is a summary (the same text as was sent to the IBPSA newsletter)
about the recent ESP-r developers workshop that was held in Glasgow.

Separately I will send out further information about the tasks that
were decided on.

Regards, Jon Hand

---------------------------

ESP-r developers conference held in Glasgow

A two day ESP-r developers conference was held in Glasgow
Scotland on the 22 and 23 of March and involved participants
and presentations from the UK, Canada, Korea, Germany,
France, The Netherlands and Switzerland. The weather was
brilliant as was the pub and dinner conversation after the
sessions.

The conference began with a review of the current state
of the software suite and work underway at various development
sites. This included the results of last years decision to
move to a single global source code repository under source
code control and feedback from users of the native Windows
version.

A policy workshop drew up a list of critical issues
to bring more 'new blood' into the developer and user community,
approach to standards compliance and validation efforts in
various countries around the world, as well as how to consolidate
the facilities offered by the suite.

The conference was timely in that there are several
groups actively working on advances in the treatment of
blinds and the tracking of solar radiation through
multiple rooms (e.g. Atria and double skin facades)
and the presentations and discussions clarified a
number of issues and found ways for cooperation.

The conference identified a number of existing features
to mainstream (e.g. adaptive convective regimes, controls
based on multiple sensors) as well as points where
consolidation was needed (example models, documentation)
and options for supporting users (a Wiki will be started
by several participants) and country specific databases
will be generated.

There are a number of approaches used in the ESP-r community
to deliver assessment results such as the in-built results
recovery and analysis tool, user customisable meters generating
XML output and a new Java tool that allows reviewing a
matrix of performance metrics within a matrix of models.
A decision was made to explore further how the XML
output could become more accessable to non-geeks.

A workshop was held outlining the organisation of the
source code repository, how the design of the repository has
responded to over 900 submissions during the year. There was
an extended 'svn for the less-geeky' session from which
participants emerged rather less confused. Several sites
which had been working in isolation agreed to link more
tightly with the core developers. A decision was also made
to include several of the BESTEST and CEN test suites
within the automated testing regime.