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Building Simulation

Parametric TAS/SAM Compliance Engine

Parametric TM59 and Part O workflow on EDSL TAS and open-source SAM, on a path to retire £100K+/year of IES VE licensing

IES VE licensing at Hoare Lea was projected past £100K/year and climbing. I’m co-developing a fully parametric TM59 and Part O workflow on EDSL TAS and SAM, currently in partial production use, with the cloud and data-lake layers still in build.

Parametric workflow header

THE COST PROBLEM

IES VE renewal at Hoare Lea was on track to exceed £100K/year. The sustainability team needed an alternative with comparable accuracy, no per-seat lock-in, and a clear migration path. TAS is a validated (paid) building performance engine; SAM is an open-source Rhino/Grasshopper interface to it, built at Hoare Lea with the code public on GitHub. Together they are a credible replacement, but only if the workflow is fast, fully parametric, and trusted by lead engineers.

I work directly with the SAM and EDSL TAS developers to build that workflow end to end.

APPROACH

Parametric pipeline from Revit/CAD/PDF geometry through to compliance outputs. Architectural geometry is cleaned and attributed in Rhino and Grasshopper. Mechanical and natural ventilation, trim cooling, full construction profiles, U-values, G-values, and frame factors attach as Grasshopper-managed metadata. Simulation runs through TAS.

This unlocks hundreds of design variants per scheme at early and intermediate stages, enabling design optimisation that is not available to teams running IES VE manually.

STATUS

Shipped (in partial production use):

  • Parametric geometry handling from Revit/CAD/PDF inputs.
  • Metadata attribution for ventilation, cooling, construction.
  • End-to-end TAS run for typical multi-level apartment schemes.
  • In use on live consultancy work, with lead engineers reviewing outputs.

Validated:

  • TAS outputs match IES VE within compliance tolerance on a set of calibration apartment schemes.
  • Lead engineers review every output on live work as a backstop.

WIP:

  • Azure Windows Server VMs with GPU passthrough for headless TAS (non-trivial, not yet deployed).
  • Company-wide data lake for simulation storage (QA, audit, future ML training).

Projected:

  • £100K+/year IES VE licensing retired as the workflow matures. Avoiding even three additional IES VE seats would on its own justify the build. Full migration depends on the cloud deployment landing and lead-engineer sign-off.

CHALLENGES

  • Geometry: Revit, CAD, and PDF inputs vary wildly. Robust cleaning and attribution in Grasshopper.
  • Feature parity with IES VE: mechanical ventilation, trim cooling, natural ventilation, full construction profiles, all required before architects trust the switch.
  • Validation: every live-project output is reviewed against IES VE.
  • Cloud deployment: headless TAS on Azure with GPU acceleration is operationally fiddly.

WORKFLOW

  1. Geometry import and cleaning from Revit, CAD, PDF in Rhino/Grasshopper.
  2. Attribute attachment: building parameters managed in the Grasshopper graph.
  3. Parametric TAS simulation with full Part O / TM59 feature set.
  4. Advanced features: mechanical/natural ventilation, trim cooling, full construction.
  5. Parametric exploration: hundreds of variants per scheme.
  6. Post-processing: automated compliance reports and visualisations.
  7. (WIP) SAM/TAS on Azure Windows Server VM with GPU acceleration.
  8. (WIP) Company-wide data lake for simulation storage.