Comparative analysis of simulation applications used for energy consumption in green buildings

Green Building philosophy is based on providing a comfortable living environment for the residents, and simultaneously maintaining a low level of negative impacts on the environment, besides applying resource-efficient methodologies throughout the life cycle of the building, including efficient usage of energy resources. To achieve these goals, software applications can be used as part of Building Information Modeling (BIM), to analyze and simulate energy consumption in Green Buildings. The main contribution of this paper lies in conducting thorough investigation and comparison of the performance of most common simulation applications used for energy consumption in green buildings, and hence the best application is selected based on unified criteria, which includes various sets of design conditions and parameters.