A Review: Simple Tools for Evaluating the Energy Performance in Early Design Stages

To make performance-based design decisions, an energy performance evaluation should be integrated into the design process. Simple tools can provide easy and rapid performance analysis without requiring detailed information as inputs. This paper presents a review of ten simple tools regarding their application, characteristics, modeling/calculation features and outputs. The key discussion focuses on the establishment of the necessary inputs. This study intends to clarify the effective approach of establishing those necessary inputs and find out the obstacles in this process. Note that building properties (BP) templates can extensively simplify the setup of construction data, internal load data and conditioning data. The lack of a method to efficiently establish energy setting parameters is recognized as the obstacle in the process of BP data setup. Reusing Building Information Model (BIM) data of past well-designed projects is expected to be a good approach to overcome that obstacle.