Emulation of Stochastic Computer Models with an Application to Building Design

未来几十年的气候变化将影响我们设计建筑的方式。特别是，绝缘的改善和温度的上升可能意味着过热成为一个严重的问题，无论是在家庭建筑还是公共建筑中(尤其是在医院)。在这篇博士论文中，我们将研究气候变化对建筑热工性能的影响。我们将使用随机天气文件驱动的建筑物的数学模型。这些使我们能够对天气的可变性进行建模。运行建筑物的完整数值模型的计算成本很高，因此我们为该模型构建了一个仿真器。仿真器是完全昂贵的数值代码的快速统计近似。因为我们使用随机天气场来驱动模型，所以我们将需要派生新的随机仿真器，以保留来自天气文件的不确定性。一旦我们建立了模拟器，我们将探索不同的未来气候和建筑设计对热性能(和过热)的影响。我们将研究建筑物的热性能优化设计的可能性，这种设计将持续50-100年。

Climate change over the next few decades will affect the way we design buildings. In particular improved insulation and rising temperatures could mean that overheating becomes a serious problem, in both domestic and public buildings (particularly in hospitals). In this PhD we will study the effect of climate change on the thermal properties of buildings. We will use mathematical models of buildings driven by stochastic weather files. These allow us to model the variability in weather. Running the full numerical model of a building is computationally expensive so we build an emulator for this model. An emulator is a fast statistical approximation to the full expensive numerical code. Because we are using stochastic weather fields to drive the model we will need to derive new stochastic emulators that preserve the uncertainty coming from the weather files. Once we have built the emulator we will explore the effect of different future climates and building designs on thermal performance (and overheating). We will investigate the possibility of optimal design for the thermal performance of buildings which will last for the next 50-100 years.