Development of a Reference Building Information Model for Thermal Model Compliance Testing (RP-1468) Part 1: Guidelines for Generating Thermal Model Input Files (OR-16-020)

This paper is the first part of two papers that report on the results of the ASHRAE-RP 1468 project. This paper presents an overview of the project and the three volumes of documentation included in the final report. The purpose of the project was to produce reference models and guidelines for developing software to automate thermal model creation from a Building Information Model (BIM) into a Building Energy Simulation (BES) for energy simulations. This paper describes the methods of the research and presents highlights of the guidelines.