OpenStudio: An Open Source Integrated Analysis Platform; Preprint

High-performance buildings require an integrated design approach for all systems to work together optimally; systems integration needs to be incorporated in the earliest stages of design for efforts to be cost and energy-use effective. Building designers need a full-featured software framework to support rigorous, multidisciplinary building simulation. An open source framework - the OpenStudio Software Development Kit (SDK) - is being developed to address this need. In this paper, we discuss the needs that drive OpenStudio's system architecture and goals, provide a development status report (the SDK is currently in alpha release), and present a brief case study that illustrates its utility and flexibility.