Conceptualization, development and validation of EMAR: A user-friendly tool for accurate energy simulations of residential buildings via few numerical inputs

The accurate simulation of energy performance is fundamental to design low energy buildings – newly-built or after refurbishment – and thus to promote sustainability. However, this is an involved task requiring high complexity in modeling and simulation. Most accurate building energy simulation tools are not user-friendly for building professionals, thereby hindering a widespread use of effective methodologies – developed by researchers – for the transition to nearly- or net-zero energy buildings. This study tries to solve such an issue by proposing a novel, accurate but user-friendly tool for building modeling and energy simulation. The tool is denoted as EMAR because it is based on the advanced coupling between ENergyplus and MAtlab® addressing Residential buildings, which are a major part of the existing stocks. EMAR completely works under MATLAB® environment and only needs around 60 numerical inputs to generate simplified building models and perform accurate energy simulations. The available outputs are numerous referring to energy and economic performance as well as thermal comfort. No drawings, no schemes of energy systems, no deep modeling expertise are required but only few numbers. EMAR is validated against detailed EnergyPlus models of an ASHRAE test building and of two typical European buildings. The discrepancies are lower than 10% as concerns thermal and primary energy needs, and in most cases are lower than 5%, but the modeling complexity and computational burden are drastically reduced. Thus, EMAR can be a precious tool to perform user-friendly but accurate building energy modeling and simulations.