Last time, we mentioned that there are many other Object-level comments, and Field-level comments and the list can be found on the top of the IDD comments sections (those lines starts with a !). Most of these comments are self-explanatory for instance the "\minimum" for a numeric number. Here I take out some not-so-intuitive but important comments and try to make them clearly by examples: Object-Level Comments: \extensible:<#>: Whenever you see this comment appears in the Obj

Last time, we mentioned a lot about the .idd file. What is it? The idd file is the EnergyPlus input data dictionary, which sets the rules for the data. You can find this file under the EnergyPlus installation folder. Its name is "Energy+.idd". You can view this file by open it in a text editor such as NotePad++ or Sublime Text. Material, \memo Regular materials described with full set of thermal properties \min-fields 6 A1 , \field Name \required-field

Most of the people in building energy modeling field know EnergyPlus, and a fair amount of people have already played around with EnergyPlus in some authoring tools such as OpenStudio, DesignBuilder, Autodesk Insight 360 orSefaira. These are great software that allows you to perform various tasks with EnergyPlus. However, these tools also set a fence on your imaginations sometimes. When this happens, a happy news is, these fences may not be there in EnergyPlus! And the bad ne

We have been hearing about Monte Carlo method a lot lately. It frequently appears in many researches. The most famous is probably the achievement from Go AI "Master" (AI "Master"), which uses the Monte Carlo tree search algorithm to evaluate every Go move. So what is Monte Carlo method?? Here is the explanation from Wikipedia: "it is a broad class of computational algorithms that relies on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results". but... what does this mean? Lets