Towards a digital representation of physical phenomena to assess comfort in future environments

This paper presents the concept and a test implementation of a digital representation of the physical world designed to assess comfort quality in future environments. An integrated set of physical phenomena is modeled three-dimensionally to investigate the dynamic behavior of design objects holistically. The formulation supports the integration of computational simulation in the performance-based design process. It employs the principles of geometrical and physical selfcontainedness to avoid that complex geometrical and physical circumstances have to be specified at design time. The concepts of congeneric cells and congeneric conjunctions are introduced to simulate various physical phenomena simultaneously with a uniformly structured set of equations. The concept, the prototype implementation and selected test cases are presented. Although it was not possible to implement all features and model parts completely, the research and the discussion of its achievements make valuable contributions towards more effective integration of computational simulation in the performance-based design process.