A multi-stages approach to the calibration of a school building's simulation model

The calibration process is an important step to improve the reliability of the simulation model and to reduce the differences between simulated and measured building energy performance. This paper presents a methodology to calibrate a building simulation model by means of low-cost monitoring set-up and short term measurements. The proposed method can be defined as a multi-stage calibration. It is based on the assumption that input data affect the simulation results differently according to the considered period of the year. It seems thus possible to calibrate different sets of parameters in different reference periods, with the advantage of using shorter recording times when the calibration periods have been consistently selected.