The Virtual Cybernetic Building Testbed (VCBT) is a whole building

emulator In computing, an emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run software or use pe ...

located at the

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical s ...

Gaithersburg, Maryland Gaithersburg ( ), officially the City of Gaithersburg, is a city in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. At the time of the 2020 U.S. Census, Gaithersburg had a population of 69,657, making it the ninth-largest location in the state. Gai ...

. It is designed with enough flexibility to be capable of reproducibly simulating normal operation and a variety of faulty and hazardous conditions that might occur in a

cybernetic Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson ma ...

building. It serves as a

testbed A testbed (also spelled test bed) is a platform for conducting rigorous, transparent, and replicable testing of scientific theories, computational tools, and new technologies. The term is used across many disciplines to describe experimental rese ...

for investigating the interactions between integrated building systems and a wide range of issues important to the development of cybernetic building technology. The VCBT consists of a variety of simulation models that together emulate the characteristics and performance of a cybernetic building system. The simulation models are interfaced to real state-of-the-art

BACnet BACnet is a communication protocol for building automation and control (BAC) networks that use the ASHRAE, ANSI, and ISO 16484-5 standards protocol. BACnet was designed to allow communication of building automation and control systems for applic ...

speaking control systems to provide a hybrid software/hardware testbed that can be used to develop and evaluate control strategies and control products that use the

communication protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchroniza ...

. The simulation models used are based on versions of HVACSIM+ and CFAST. {{cite web , title=Concentrated Model of Fire and Smoke Transport (CFAST) , date=25 May 2010 , url=http://cfast.nist.gov/

References

Cybernetics Building automation Control engineering