<div dir="ltr"><div><div>Drake,<br><br></div><div>That's a good observation. Something that Nick and the team did a good job of conveying throughout the competition was that good design comes more from the mastery of your tools rather than the features of your tools. Honestly, I was impressed with all of the team's results.<br></div><div><br></div>We used a custom developed tool and the DOE2 engine to run our multi-variable optimizations. Each simulation is a simple process of programmatically writing an .inp file, running the DOE2 engine, and programmatically reading the text-based results.<br><br>If you're interested in the boring details of the tool...We used a Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) algorithm with a modification of the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm to solve the quadratic sub-problem. This is in contrast to the methods used in other simulation tools which were presented at the conference which are bounded methods that use search heuristics. The big difference is that our algorithms require the calculation of derivatives by finite difference and the others do not. The advantage to our approach is that we are guaranteed to know if we've hit a local optimal whereas you can never be 100% sure when using other methods. The price to pay is that the derivatives are very expensive to calculate, but our thinking was that this is nothing to shy away from since the DOE2 engine can execute in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, this did not go exactly as planned for the 24 variable case (Hessian matrices can get very large very quickly!). I believe that these technical difficulties could have been overcome with a little more time. So we were only able to run the SQP algorithm on 2 and 3 variables at a time. To make up for this, we used the SQP results as a starting point and ran a more brute-force Monte Carlo algorithm on all 24 parameters simultaneously. This is where we randomly varied the 24 variables over a set domain and 60000 simulations and selected the best results.<br><br></div>Aaron<br><div><br clear="all"><div>---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: "Drake A. Wahlers" <<a href="mailto:DAWahlers@leopardo.com" target="_blank">DAWahlers@leopardo.com</a>><br>To: Nicholas
Caton <<a href="mailto:ncaton@catonenergy.com" target="_blank">ncaton@catonenergy.com</a>>,
"<a href="mailto:equest-users@lists.onebuilding.org" target="_blank">equest-users@lists.onebuilding.org</a>"
<<a href="mailto:equest-users@lists.onebuilding.org" target="_blank">equest-users@lists.onebuilding.org</a>><br>Cc: "Sloat, Cara" <<a href="mailto:Cara.Sloat@wspgroup.com" target="_blank">Cara.Sloat@wspgroup.com</a>><br>Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 14:00:35 +0000<br>Subject: Re: [Equest-users] Team eQUEST: Lowdown Showdown Report<br>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)">Well done , Nick, as well as the rest of the team.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)">I just attended the
Chicago ASHRAE meeting in which the IES modeling team presented their
results. It was very interesting in how they came up with a similar
building and system design in a very different modeling
environment.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)">I’m curious as to how you automated the multivariable simulation process.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)">Thanks,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color:gray">Drake Wahlers, P.E., CEM</span></b><span style="color:rgb(127,127,127)"><br>
Energy and Development Engineer</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(127,127,127)"> </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"> </span></p>
<div>
<div style="border-width:1pt medium medium;border-style:solid none none;border-color:rgb(181,196,223) -moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color;padding:3pt 0in 0in">
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"">From:</span></b><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif""> Equest-users [mailto:<a href="mailto:equest-users-bounces@lists.onebuilding.org" target="_blank">equest-users-bounces@lists.onebuilding.org</a>]
<b>On Behalf Of </b>Nicholas Caton<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Tuesday, November 10, 2015 9:53 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:equest-users@lists.onebuilding.org" target="_blank">equest-users@lists.onebuilding.org</a><br>
<b>Cc:</b> Sloat, Cara<br>
<b>Subject:</b> [Equest-users] Team eQUEST: Lowdown Showdown Report</span></p>
</div>
</div>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This year at the 2015 ASHRAE Energy Modeling
Conference, there was a “Lowdown Showdown” design competition.
Voluntary teams representing most commercial energy simulation software
packages & platforms tried to tackle a relatively open
design challenge to bring a building (of our own design) down to
net-zero energy. The relatively small team representing eQUEST/DOE-2
won an award by popular vote for the “Most Creative” design solution!
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The eQUEST team had 5 members (all CC’ed on this
email thread) - you may recognize a few as frequent contributors over
these mailing lists:</p>
<p><span style="font-family:Symbol">·</span><span style="font-size:7pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">
</span>Aaron Powers</p>
<p><span style="font-family:Symbol">·</span><span style="font-size:7pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">
</span>Cara Sloat </p>
<p><span style="font-family:Symbol">·</span><span style="font-size:7pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">
</span>Pasha Korber-Gonzales</p>
<p><span style="font-family:Symbol">·</span><span style="font-size:7pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">
</span>Chris Jones</p>
<p><span style="font-family:Symbol">·</span><span style="font-size:7pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">
</span>Nick Caton</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I served as ‘coach’ for the team, and in that
context am very proud to share some new information concerning our
collaborative efforts, design process, and the final ‘product’ with the
greater eQUEST-users community. Those who were able
to attend the conference experienced a live presentation by
representatives for the teams and a panel discussion with all of the
coaches to field questions/challenges from the audience, but time was
quite constrained. This this is an opportunity to share
with those who could not attend and to convey/discuss things in more
detail.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Attached is a ‘poster’ that covers much of the
information we presented for the project, and outlines the process we
followed over the ~9 weeks we had to collaborate. We accomplished a
great deal in the time we had, in spite of a late
start due to some difficulties in assembling the minimum # of members
required. The team met weekly via VOIP calls (Skype/<a href="http://join.me" target="_blank">join.me</a>)
to coordinate efforts, present individual findings, and to simply share
knowledge and relate/compare
experiences. As a group, each individual identified and contributed
challenges/problems/systems of interest early on, and as a group we made
it a goal to incorporate those elements into our project along the
way. This ‘spirit’ to tackle new/interesting issues
and to avoid “easy/obvious” solutions lead to some interesting design
decisions along the way! </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I initially thought I would make it a personal goal
to ensure the project would be engaging, informative, and rewarding for
every participant, but I learned that with the right group that is
going to happen anyway! My only regret is that
more of my friends and colleagues in the industry did not get to
participate. I sincerely hope when the next opportunity comes along,
more individuals from this community will take the initiative to
participate – it was very much worth our time!
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If anybody would like to learn more or ask questions, please freely reply to this email thread!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Kind regards,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">~Nick</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:14pt;color:rgb(0,32,96)">NICK CATON, P.E.</span></b><span style="font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)"><br>
</span><b><span style="color:rgb(86,23,130)">Owner</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color:rgb(86,23,130)"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10pt;color:rgb(86,23,130)">Caton Energy Consulting</span></b><span style="font-size:10pt;color:black"><br>
</span><span style="font-size:10pt;color:rgb(31,73,125)"> 306 N Ferrel</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10pt;color:rgb(31,73,125)"> Olathe, KS 66061</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10pt;color:rgb(31,73,125)"> office: <a href="tel:785.410.3317" value="+17854103317" target="_blank">785.410.3317</a></span></p>
<span style="font-size:10pt;color:rgb(86,23,130)"><a href="http://www.catonenergy.com" target="_blank"><span style="color:rgb(86,23,130)">www.catonenergy.com</span></a></span></div></div></div>