ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how simulation supports performance-based building through different lifecycle stages, with a focus on the design stage. As design evolves, a building project invokes many intermittent and recurring dialogues between stakeholders that engage in the definition and subsequent negotiation of performance requirements and their fulfillment. This requires, among others, an agreement about how to quantify performance, i.e. how to choose an adequate measurement method. Measurement methods not only quantify performance criteria but also de facto define them. The chapter shows how any objective specification of performance criteria and their measurements can be derived while avoiding subjective bias in their interpretation. It focuses on issues of design evolution and decision making, the anachronism between the importance of early design decisions and the deficiencies of simulation tools to support them, the aggregation of simulation results into meaningful expressions of performance, the role of uncertainty and the need to distinguish performance evaluation from software execution.
