Open Access Mini Review

Application of the Virtual Information Fabric Infrastructure (VIFI) to Building Performance Simulations

Yimin Zhu1*, Yong Tao2 and William J Tolone3 *

1Department of Construction Management, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

2Department of Mechanical Engineering, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH, USA

3College of Computing and Informatics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

Corresponding Author

Received Date: October 25, 2019;  Published Date: November 06, 2019

Abstract

Although contemporary information and computer technologies enable 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 system view toward building performance simulations, in which essential components of simulations are coherently integrated.

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