Abstract: Building environmental design decision support tools in architecture are not well used, even though there exists a wide range of tools for thermal, lighting, structural, etc simulation. Previous work has looked at the issues which inhibit the use of these decision support tools (Donn et al. 2001) and determined that a simulation quality assurance system would help practitioners to trust the predictions of a simulation system. This paper describes the development of a distributed building simulation q uality control system. The basic premise behind this work is that we can determine the reliability of the results of an individual simulation through comparison with previous quality assured simulations. This requires a test to determine whether an e-building is real, where real is some measure relating the behaviour of the e-building to know real building behaviour. To make this test we collate a case base of quality assured ebuildings with which we can compare the submitted e-building. The development of the case base is drawn from the Internet by developing the semantic web concept. This requires simulationists to provide meta-data describing their simulations which is then harvested across the WWW, along with the simulations, to form a global and distributed simulation case base.
This paper describes the Internet-based system which has been developed to collate the case base from interested simulationists (comprising XML-based meta-data and simulation files) and utilise it in comparing with a submitted e-building. The comparison system utilises XML-based information management approaches tied to case-based reasoning to create this high-performance decision support system for archite cts.
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