Development history and related libraries
AixLib is intended to be used for building performance simulation by engineers, researchers, and students. In the past, development of Modelica libraries for building performance simulation suffered from uncoordinated parallel development and incompatibility between different libraries. In order to overcome this unsatisfying situation, several developer groups have joined forces within the Annex 60 project (http://www.iea-annex60.org) of the International Energy Agency's Energy in Buildings and Communities Program. Together, these groups have developed the Modelica IBPSA library (former Annex 60 library), that was intended as a common base library for other Modelica building libraries for end-users. By using common base classes, the aim is to ensure compatibility between different libraries. The development ran between 2012 and 2017 through the Annex 60 project and continues through the IBPSA Project 1 of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA).
Taken from the description of the Modelica IBPSA library:
The Modelica IBPSA library is a free open-source library with basic models that codify best practices for the implementation of models for building and community energy and control systems.
The development of the IBPSA library is organized through the IBPSA Modelica Working Group (https://github.com/ibpsa/modelica-working-group). The development was organized from 2017 to 2022 through the IBPSA Project 1 (https://ibpsa.github.io/project1) of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA), and from 2012 to 2017 through the Annex 60 project (http://www.iea-annex60.org) of the Energy in Buildings and Communities Programme of the International Energy Agency (IEA EBC).
This library is typically not used directly by end-users. Rather, it is integrated by developers of other Modelica libraries for building and community energy systems, who then distribute it to end-users as part of their respective library. Currently, the IBPSA library is used as the core of these libraries:
- AixLib, from RWTH Aachen University, Germany: https://github.com/RWTH-EBC/AixLib
- Buildings, from LBNL, Berkeley, CA, USA: http://simulationresearch.lbl.gov/modelica
- BuildingSystems, from UdK Berlin, Germany: http://www.modelica-buildingsystems.de
- IDEAS from KU Leuven, Belgium: https://github.com/open-ideas/IDEAS
This concept is also illustrated by the following figure:
How to merge the IBPSA core library into the AixLib is explained here
Next to the libraries based on the Modelica IBPSA library, many other libraries in the context of Modelica and building simulations exist. For further information we refer to the BESMod paper, that gives an overview about some of those libraries and what they can be used for.