Panel Talk: The Virtual Information Fabric Infrastructure (VIFI): Application Cases for Building Performance Simulations
Food-Energy-Water Nexus
2019
2019 Food-Energy-Water Nexus
Abstract Submissions
Panel 1: City-as-lab INFEW RCN: Research Gaps, Current Models and Tools Available for the Stakeholders
Thursday, December 5, 2019 - 10:40am to 11:05am
Although contemporary information and computer technologies have enabled researchers, designers, and engineers to collect large amounts of data, current approaches for sharing data remain limited by concerns such as interoperability, shareability, data size, transport costs, and privacy. These concerns often prevent or confound the development of reliable and accurate building performance simulations. In an effort to overcome these concerns, we envisioned a complementary approach, called the Virtual Information Fabric Infrastructure (VIFI) approach, where data owners share distributed, fragmented data in a manner that does not require the movement of raw data and data users utilize these data for analysis by transporting analytic computation to the data. The VIFI approach presents new opportunities to conduct building performance simulations. Through two case studies, we demonstrated a new computational framework based on VIFI to support an open and collaborative cyberinfrastructure for building performance simulations. Such a computational framework represents a systematic view toward building performance simulations, in which essential components of simulations are coherently integrated.