Building Simulation Conference Proceedings

About Building Simulation Conference Proceedings

Building Simulation Conference Proceedings — Overview

Building Simulation is the flagship international conference of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA), and the Building Simulation Conference Proceedings are the published record of that conference: the collected, peer-reviewed papers through which the building performance simulation community — the researchers, software developers and practitioners who model how buildings use energy, move air and light, and keep occupants comfortable — has reported its progress for four decades. Accuracy about the category matters here as much as anywhere in this directory: these are conference proceedings, not a journal. There is no Building Simulation journal under this title (the field's journal is the separate Journal of Building Performance Simulation, published by Taylor & Francis as IBPSA's official journal — a related but different publication, with its own ISSNs, which should not be confused with these proceedings). The proceedings have no Impact Factor, no article processing charge and no issue schedule. What they have is scale, longevity and centrality: the Building Simulation conference is described by IBPSA itself as the premier international event in the field of building performance simulation, held every two years in a different world city, and all papers presented in the proceedings of IBPSA's conferences are made available through IBPSA's own publications archive.

Building performance simulation is the discipline of predicting, with computer models, how a building will behave before it is built or how it might be improved once it exists: its heating and cooling loads, its energy consumption and carbon emissions, the daylight on its desks, the airflow through its rooms, the thermal comfort of its occupants, and increasingly the performance of whole districts and cities. It underpins energy codes, green building certification, retrofit programmes and net-zero design. The Building Simulation conference is where the makers and the most demanding users of the field's tools — programs with lineages running through EnergyPlus, ESP-r, TRNSYS and many others — meet to compare methods, validate models against measurements, and argue about the physics and the data. The proceedings are therefore not a by-product of the conference; they are one of the field's principal literatures.

History and Editions

The conference's roots lie in the building energy simulation meetings of the mid-1980s: a Building Energy Simulation Conference was held in Seattle, Washington, in August 1985, its proceedings recorded in the U.S. Department of Energy's OSTI database, with sessions on microcomputer techniques and solar-related programs that date the field precisely to the moment when simulation moved from mainframes to desks. IBPSA itself was founded in January 1987 as a non-profit international society of building performance simulation researchers, developers and practitioners dedicated to improving the built environment, and under its stewardship the Building Simulation conference settled into the biennial rhythm it keeps today.

The modern edition sequence shows the conference's global rotation. The 14th conference, BS2015, was held in Hyderabad, India, in December 2015. The 15th, BS2017, met in San Francisco, California, on 7–9 August 2017, covering energy simulation, airflow and natural ventilation, thermal comfort, lighting and daylighting, and acoustics. The sequence continued through Rome and Bruges to the 17th conference, BS2023, held in Shanghai, China, on 4–6 September 2023, whose themes extended the field's frontier to carbon-emission policy, power systems at metropolis level, energy flows among regional cities, petascale data mining, human factors, AI-assisted decision making and interoperability in modelling and design. The 18th conference, Building Simulation 2025, was held in Brisbane, Australia, on 24–27 August 2025 with additional workshops on 28 August, drawing more than 400 speakers across nine parallel rooms and hundreds more delegates in person and online, with strong content on net-zero design, urban-scale modelling and integrated workflows. Between the world conferences, IBPSA's regional affiliates — 31 affiliates spanning five continents, from IBPSA-USA and IBPSA-Canada to IBPSA-England, IBPSA-India and IBPSA-China — run their own conferences (SimBuild, eSim, BSO and many others), whose proceedings likewise feed the IBPSA publications archive.

Aims and Scope

IBPSA's purpose, which the conference serves, is to provide a forum for researchers, developers and practitioners to review building simulation model developments, encourage the use of simulation software, address standardisation, and accelerate integration and technology transfer through the exchange of knowledge and the organisation of international conferences. Within that mission, the Building Simulation proceedings characteristically cover:

• Energy simulation and building physics — heat and moisture transfer through envelopes, HVAC system modelling, plant and controls simulation, and whole-building energy prediction.
• Airflow, ventilation and indoor environment — multizone airflow modelling, coupling of energy simulation with computational fluid dynamics, natural ventilation, indoor air quality and pollutant transport.
• Thermal comfort and occupant behaviour — comfort models, adaptive comfort, occupant behaviour modelling, and the human factors that simulation must represent to predict real performance.
• Lighting and daylighting — daylight simulation, electric lighting integration, glare and visual comfort.
• Acoustics and other physical domains — the 2017 programme explicitly included acoustics among its areas, reflecting the "performance" breadth in IBPSA's full name.
• Validation, calibration and uncertainty — empirical validation of models (in the tradition of the IEA BESTEST diagnostic tests), calibration against measured data, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis.
• Software, interoperability and workflows — simulation program development, BIM-to-simulation data exchange (including IFC-based frameworks), co-simulation, and integration of simulation into design practice.
• Urban and district scale — city-scale energy modelling, district systems, and the macroscale themes prominent at BS2023: carbon policy, regional energy flows and big-data approaches.
• Data-driven and AI-assisted methods — machine learning surrogates, data mining of building performance data, and AI-assisted decision making, a named frontier theme of recent editions.
• Applications and case studies — simulation in design practice, codes and standards, retrofit analysis, and post-occupancy comparison of predicted and actual performance.

The intended audience is the whole simulation community at once: academic researchers, the developers of simulation software, practising engineers and architects who use simulation in design, and — as BS2023 explicitly intended — policymakers whose carbon and energy decisions simulation informs.

Publication Details

Organisation, Governance and Peer Review

IBPSA is governed by a board of directors elected by the membership of its regional affiliates, comprising the president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer, members-at-large and representatives sent by the affiliates. The world conference is delivered by a local organising committee in the host city under IBPSA's oversight, with an international scientific committee responsible for the programme. Papers submitted to Building Simulation undergo peer review by the conference's scientific reviewers — the field's standard double-review process for its flagship meeting — and accepted papers are presented in the conference's parallel technical sessions or as posters and published in the proceedings. With more than 400 speakers across nine rooms at the 2025 edition, the review operation is one of the largest in building science. Authors must follow the specific edition's call for papers for deadlines, templates and page limits; these are published on each edition's conference website (bs2023.org for the Shanghai edition, for example) and are not maintained centrally for the series.

The association around the conference is part of its value. IBPSA's 31 regional affiliates organise local conferences, software workshops and symposia between world conferences; the association publishes the twice-yearly ibpsaNEWS newsletter; it has partnered with ASHRAE and IESNA on the Building Energy Modeling Professional certification; and it supports the mailing lists and question-and-answer communities through which simulation practitioners exchange knowledge daily. A Building Simulation paper thus enters not just a proceedings volume but a standing professional ecosystem.

Indexing and Availability

IBPSA states that all papers presented in the proceedings of its conferences are available at IBPSA's website, through its publications archive (publications.ibpsa.org), which is the authoritative open source for the proceedings papers across editions. Individual papers are extensively cited and are discoverable through Google Scholar and the scholarly databases that index building-science conference literature; the proceedings literature is woven into the field's citation fabric — review papers in journals such as Building and Environment and the Journal of Building Performance Simulation cite Building Simulation papers as primary sources for the capabilities of simulation programs and the state of validation practice. Because identifier practice varies across four decades of editions, readers verifying a specific paper should search the IBPSA archive by author and title and cite the paper with its conference edition (for example, "Proceedings of the 15th IBPSA Conference, San Francisco, CA, USA, 7–9 August 2017"), as the field's own referencing practice does.

Metrics and Standing

No Journal Impact Factor, CiteScore-as-a-journal or published acceptance rate exists for these proceedings, and this profile fabricates none. The standing of Building Simulation is established by evidence proper to a flagship conference: IBPSA's own description of it as the premier international event in building performance simulation; an unbroken biennial sequence under an association founded in 1987 with thousands of members (IBPSA's membership is reported at around 4,700) and 31 regional affiliates; attendance at the scale of the 2025 Brisbane edition, with over 400 speakers; and the proceedings' demonstrable role as a primary literature of the field, cited in the reference lists of its leading journals and review articles. Researchers deciding where to submit should weigh that centrality, the quality of the reviewing community, and the proceedings' open archival availability, rather than journal metrics that do not apply.

Submitting to Building Simulation: Practical Guidance

Participation begins with the edition's call for papers, typically issued well over a year before the conference, with abstract and full-paper stages. Manuscripts should present original work in building performance simulation — a model development, a validation study, a methodological advance, a significant application — prepared to the edition's template and page limit and submitted for scientific peer review. Three practical expectations recur in this community's reviewing culture. First, rigour about validation: claims for a model or tool are expected to be supported by comparison with measurements, established test suites such as BESTEST, or other recognised benchmarks. Second, reproducibility: inputs, assumptions and software versions should be reported precisely enough for others to repeat the work. Third, relevance to practice or to the science of simulation should be explicit, since the audience mixes researchers with the engineers who will use the results in design and policy. Accepted authors register and present at the conference; the paper is then published in the proceedings and archived by IBPSA. Researchers whose work matures further often extend conference papers into articles for the Journal of Building Performance Simulation or other building-science journals — a recognised pathway in this field, provided the journal version adds substantial new material and cites the proceedings paper.

The Proceedings as a Literature: How the Field Uses Them

Understanding how building scientists actually use these proceedings explains why a conference record carries unusual weight in this discipline. Building simulation advances through software and through shared test problems as much as through theory, and both kinds of progress are naturally reported first — often only — at the conference. When researchers publish a contrasting-capabilities study of the major simulation programs, as the well-known comparisons in the journal literature do, their reference lists lean on Building Simulation and affiliate-conference papers for the documented behaviour of the tools. When a new validation method, a new coupling between an energy model and a CFD model, or a new approach to co-simulation for predicting the performance of integrated building energy systems appears, its canonical citation is frequently a proceedings paper — the field's books and theses cite, for instance, the 6th International IBPSA Conference in Kyoto for the linking of the COMIS multizone airflow model with the EnergyPlus building energy simulation program, and the 5th conference, also in Kyoto, for coupling building energy and lighting simulation. Doctoral theses in building physics treat the proceedings as a primary archive, which is why so many proceedings papers remain discoverable today through university repositories and the IBPSA archive itself.

The proceedings also document the field's intellectual turns with unusual clarity. The 1985 Seattle programme — microcomputer techniques and solar programs — belongs to the era when simulation meant passive solar design on new desktop machines. The middle decades' proceedings track the consolidation of whole-building energy programs, the BESTEST validation culture championed by researchers such as Ron Judkoff and Joel Neymark, and the growing attention to airflow, moisture and comfort. The most recent editions record the current turns: from single buildings to districts and cities, from deterministic physics models to data-driven and AI-assisted methods, from energy alone to carbon, resilience and human factors. A reader who works through the BS2015, BS2017, BS2023 and 2025 programmes in sequence can watch a technical community renegotiate its purpose — from predicting energy bills to underwriting the net-zero transition — in its own words. That documentary function, on top of the papers' individual technical value, is what makes the Building Simulation Conference Proceedings a reference collection rather than a mere conference souvenir, and it is why this profile treats the series at length while being precise that it is not a journal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are the Building Simulation Conference Proceedings a journal?

No. They are the proceedings of IBPSA's biennial Building Simulation conference. IBPSA's journal is the separate Journal of Building Performance Simulation, published by Taylor & Francis; the two should not be confused.

Who organises the Building Simulation conference?

The International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA), a non-profit society founded in January 1987, working with regional affiliates and local organising committees in each host city.

How often and where is it held?

Every two years in rotating cities: recent editions include Hyderabad (2015), San Francisco (2017), Shanghai (2023) and Brisbane (2025).

Where can I read the proceedings papers?

Through IBPSA's publications archive on its website, which the association states holds all papers from its conferences' proceedings.

Do the proceedings have an ISSN or an Impact Factor?

No single series ISSN or Impact Factor is published for the proceedings as a whole; papers are cited by conference edition and year. Journal metrics belong to journals, not to this proceedings series.

Is there an article processing charge?

No journal-style APC applies. Presenting authors pay conference registration, set per edition by the local organisers.

How are papers reviewed?

By peer review under the edition's international scientific committee, in line with the standards of a flagship international conference; accepted papers are presented and published in the proceedings.

What topics do the proceedings cover?

Building energy and environmental simulation in full: energy and HVAC modelling, airflow and CFD coupling, thermal comfort and occupant behaviour, daylighting, acoustics, validation and uncertainty, software and BIM interoperability, urban-scale modelling, and AI-assisted and data-driven methods.

Summary Assessment

The Building Simulation Conference Proceedings are the published memory of building performance simulation's flagship gathering: a biennial, IBPSA-run record running from the field's 1980s beginnings to the 400-speaker Brisbane conference of 2025, openly archived by the association and cited throughout the building-science literature. For anyone researching how buildings are modelled — or deciding where the field's own community will read their work — these proceedings are a first-rank source. They should be understood and cited as what they are: the proceedings of the premier conference of a mature international society, not a journal, and all the stronger for being judged on those terms.

Profile marker: DEPTH-BATCH226. Facts are drawn from IBPSA's published descriptions of the association and its conferences, the proceedings literature itself, and reporting of the 2023 and 2025 editions; details of forthcoming editions should be confirmed on the edition's official conference website.