Interfaces and procedures

In place of a CAD-Interface a universal solution was chosen, which is internally called "Lacgraph": digital pictures are taken of old as well as new construction plans, read in, and displayed on the screen where corrections can be added.

Figure 2: Example of a simple building model with air exchange and controlled heating

Following the definition of the properties of the walls, windows, and different zones of the building, a model of the building is automatically produced from the library blocks. The simulation for the determination of heating and ventilation demands can be started imme­diately. In addition to the automated model creation, it is possible to manually create models by copying library compo­nents into a project. These components can be wired and parameterised by masks on the user interface.

The connections between blocks corre­spond to the flow of both physical media, measurement and control data in a real system. Examples of the first including air, water and power while the meas­urement and control data refers to quan­tities such as temperature, pressure and humidity. All blocks are colour coded in “Lacasa’’ according to the functional group they belong to. In addition, model blocks can be used for the input of measurement data as well as for the ex­port of data generated during simulation.