Distributed building energy simulation with the HLA

The primary aim of this work is to demonstrate the feasibility of applying the High Level Architecture (HLA) framework to the distributed execution of physical urban building energy simulations that are too large to be supported within the resource constraints of a single computing node. To this end, we modify the building energy simulation tool CitySim+ to make it HLA-compliant, and use this to conduct distributed computational experiments over a small network of computing nodes. For our experiments, we consider some real-world urban models containing up to about 120,000 building surfaces. In addition to demonstrating the feasibility of our approach, the experiments further provide some performance measures to help us evaluate the appropriateness of applying the HLA in the urban simulation context. From the results of the experiments, we briefly discuss the trade-offs between the computation time and the communication and synchronization overheads involved in our distributed building energy simulation.