EnergyPlus is a whole-building energy simulation program that engineers, architects, and researchers use to model both energy consumption — for heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, and process and plug loads — and water use in buildings. Its development is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Building Technologies Office. EnergyPlus is a console-based program that reads input and writes output to text files. Several comprehensive graphical interfaces for EnergyPlus are also available.
EnergyPlus is normally used as a stand-alone command-line application or together with one of many free or commercial GUIs. However, EnergyPlus can be linked with other applications to simulate more advanced numerical models. One method is BCVTB (Building Controls Virtual Test Bed), which allows users to couple different simulation programs for co-simulation, and to couple simulation programs with actual hardware. For example, the BCVTB can simulate a building in EnergyPlus and the HVAC and control system in Modelica, exchanging data between them as they simulate. Programs that can be linked to BCVTB include EnergyPlus, Modelica (OpenModelica or Dymola), Functional Mock-up Units, MATLAB, and Simulink, Radiance for ray-tracing, ESP-r, TRNSYS, BACnet stack.
There exist many software tools that can automate sensitivity analysis to various degrees. Here is a non-exhaustive list. Most of these tools have multiple options, including one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis, multidimensional discrete parametric, continuous low-discrepancy distributions, and pareto-front optimization (listed alphabetically):
