HackSimBuild is a 24-hour hackathon where participants (you) develop and test creative new approaches to building performance simulation. This event will bring together modelers, programmers, students, academics, designers, and engineers of all types to collaborate in a design sprint. At the end of this fun and immersive event, we will award prizes to the teams with the most original, innovative, and market-ready tools, metrics, ideas, or other hacks they present to our industry-leading panel of jurors.

HackSimBuild invites you to network and form teams to address challenges like these:

• Create a new metric we should use in building design including why it is important and how to calculate it
• Demonstrate a building science concept to someone without an architecture, engineering, or construction background
• Diagnose a cause of the performance gap between a building energy model and a real building
• Make quality of life improvement in the practice of building performance simulation.

The challenges are open-ended, spanning the intersection of buildings and simulation. Solutions can involve any combination of hardware, software, graphics, or processes.

WINNERS FOR 2022 HackSimBuild:
Updated December 22, 2022

Want to hear more from our winning teams?  Join us for the IBPSA-Mixsa: Can You Hack It? Hackathon Showcase and Happy Hour

Best Overall Hack

Awarded to the most innovative and well-executed project with the biggest “wow” factor.

WINNER: Team Komodo Dragon (Jorge Cobo, Kaustav Das, Akshat Goyal, and Saurav Ayyagari): A framework for modeling the relationship between structure, carbon, and thermal performance of buildings.

Best Simulation Practice Improvement

Awarded to the project that will significantly help many simulation professionals in their daily practice.

WINNER: Team TrueFlow (Ken Takahashi, Taiki Uchida, Daisuke Matsuyama, Yoshito Takahashi, and Yoshiaki Ishii): A tool that maps measured or calculated wind pressure coefficient distributions onto building facades to simulate accurate natural ventilation. On GitHub.

Most Creative Demonstration

Awarded to the team that best communicates their project.  This could be visualizations or demonstrations from their project or the quality and creativity of the final presentation.

WINNER: Team JAHMM (Matteo Calafiura-Soleri, Haowen Xu, Jamie Lian, Andy Berres, and Mostapha Roudsari): SimuMo, an immersive model visualization platform for building simulation data using virtual reality. On GitHub.

Honorable Mention: 

Team Calcar (Alex Chapin, Andrew Rivera, and Cameron Lawrence): A surrogate model of peak HVAC loads based on 2D floor plans. On GitHub.

Team Missing Mr. Mitchell (Al Mitchell, David Goldwasser, Jongki Lee, Lobna Mitkees, and Nupoor Kansara): An OpenStudio measure for thermal resilience.

Team SanAntonionio (Anna Morton, Matthew Coleman, Aresen Boundoane, Joe Rivera, and Matt Koch): A carbon optimization tool for HVAC system selection.

Team SOM (Nicholas Chan, ChingChe Huang, and Deva Shree Saini): Educational material on thermal comfort and psychrometry.

Exhibition: 

Team Double Entendre (Matthew Dahlhausen and Aaron Boranian): An event to promote networking and knowledge sharing in building performance simulation, through the use of an escape room.

• Creativity and Innovation (25%)
  How innovative and groundbreaking is the idea? Is it something that we could see changing the BEM industry?
• Execution (25%)
  How well implemented is the hack? How difficult was the technical problem that the team solved? Did you find a new use for, or leverage, an existing piece of technology?
• Teamwork & Collaboration (20%)
  How diverse is the team across professional disciplines, skill sets, and organizations?
• Open-source (20%)
  Is the project on GitHub/Bitbucket? Is it open-source? Is it well-documented with examples? Did you build upon other open-source software?
• Learning (10%)
  Did team members challenge themselves to learn something new? Which technologies/APIs/products/methods did you use that you didn’t know before