Description on how to manage your Green Building Studio account.
Recent improvements and updates made to Green Building Studio:
December 9, 2013
Version 2014.2.31.8715 (DOE-2.2-44e4 )
Runset Features
Quicker feedback on PES with faster mass run.
Performance improvement on Project Solon page.
October 27, 2013
Version 2014.2.31.4804 (DOE-2.2-44e4)
The previous release of Autodesk Green Building Studio's Project Solon displayed energy results in the widgets and dashboards from a sample project ( Autodesk Benchtop Commercial Office Project ). This release now enables you to select one of your own project runs in the widget editor page, and view the energy results of your selected runs within the widgets and dashboard.
September 8, 2013
Version 2014.2.30.9990 (DOE-2.2-44e4)
This release of Autodesk Green Building Studio's Project Solon Alpha addresses back-end database improvements and minor navigation bug fixes.
August 18, 2013
Version 2014.0.30.7961 (DOE-2.2-44e4)
New Features
Project Solon Alpha Release is the first of a series of releases for customizing the types of results to report out of GBS energy analysis.
Widget creation: create dynamic custom charts to display specific energy analysis results.
Dashboard creation: build custom dashboards, which are collections of widgets.
June 21, 2013
Version 2014.2.30.752 (DOE-2.2-44e4)
New Features
Green Building Studio has a new landing page (https://gbs.autodesk.com/) with links to our blog, a Getting Started Guide, an introduction to Green Building Studio features, and links to some of our Validation document.
Revit and Vasari projects now feature the Potential Energy Savings (PES) Chart in the Results and Compare window, as well as links to Green Building Studio web pages from the Results and Compare window.
May 2013
Version 2014.2.29.5754 (DOE-2.2-44e4)
New Features
Potential Energy Savings (PES) feature in an industry-first—GBS automatically initiates parametric studies of nearly 40 design alternatives for your project when you use Revit or Vasari’s energy analysis feature, or import a gbXML file into GBS.
Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) API has been released to the ADN environment. To provide flexibility on the PES feature, a set of new APIs are provided so the user can turn on and off this feature the at user account and project level via API call.
Enhancements
The improvement revised the assignment of schedules for infiltration rates from zero percentage when fans are on, to a minimum of 0.25 while fans are operational.
Maintenance/Bug Fixes
The bug fix addressed the method used for transforming BIM surface areas to polygons used by the DOE-2 simulation engine. This affects how lighting power density, equipment power density, and occupancy density is calculated.
Daylighting energy savings are now calculated using the California Energy Commission method of applying an adjustment to the lighting power density, rather than simulating the daylighting in DOE-2. In some Revit and Vasari model spaces the daylighting sensors are not placed in the correct positions--this is necessary for the DOE-2 simulation of daylighting. The CEC method is a more conservative approach than the DOE-2 simulation method.
Validation Testing
Potential Energy Analysis Validation consisted of more than 171,000 energy simulations, which were carefully reviewed by our QA and building science experts’ team.
Regression Validation resulted in expected energy usage differences compared to the previous release. These differences are due to improvements and bug fixes to the tool. Additionally the regression validation compared all of the surface counts and areas, and the opening counts and areas between pre- and post-processed gbXML files with zero percent change between the current and the previous release.
Previous Release Validation
Simulation Engine Validation – ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 140 . Green Building Studio web service simulation results were evaluated and met the criteria, under ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 140, Standard Method of Test for the Evaluation of Building Energy Analysis Computer Programs, and certified by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Photovoltaic Potential Validation . Autodesk’s Green Building Studio calculates the potential PV performance on every exterior surface a submitted building model and reports on those surfaces with better than the user-specified payback period. Work was done to validate the results of these calculations in consultation with National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL), who wrote the book on PV analysis. GBS passed all of the validation criteria.
April 2013
Version 2014.2.29.4679 (DOE-2.2-44e4)
To support the continuing increase in usage we have made some major improvements to the GBS underlining technology to significantly improved our GBS web service and its cloud infrastructure for fast simulation and substantively larger number of runs.
This release includes
Vertical scale up our server equipment.
New feature that controls multiple runs per server feature so that each app server can process at least 8x more without sacrificing any run time or performance factors.
New functionality for ‘autoscaling’ that horizontally scales the system to spin up additional app servers to handle peak load when necessary, and scale down at other times to save you money.
October 2012
Green Button energy data. Now when uploading utility billing data, if your utility company has adopted the Green Button initiative, you can upload Green Button data to your project in order to compare your actual and as-modeled energy usage. See Adding Utility Billing Data .
Ongoing Maintenance. As part of the ongoing maintenance of Green Building Studio, several issues have been resolved.