Case Study: Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) achieves faster, more effective green-building design with Lumina Decision Systems’ Analytica

Importance Analysis Helps Green Building Design

Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) was looking for a practical way to help architects prioritize design choices for green buildings without the time and cost of extensive point-based energy simulations. CIFE needed to run hundreds of DOE-2 experiments and present intuitive, actionable summaries of how design parameters affect energy and cost. To meet that need they used Lumina Decision Systems’ Analytica linked to DOE-2 for large-scale meta-analysis and sensitivity ranking.

Lumina Decision Systems implemented Analytica to run all 486 design combinations rapidly and compute “importance” (rank-correlation sensitivity) for six key decisions (insulation, windows, lighting, etc.). In controlled student experiments, teams given Analytica’s importance information consistently found better-performing solutions, increased design efficiency (predicted performance per analysis), and reduced completion times compared with traditional analysis; Analytica’s engine thereby delivered measurable improvements in navigating the design tradeoffs.

Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE)

Caroline Clevenger

Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE)