Preface

This edited volume comprises research and review chapters primarily resulting from the recent U.S.-China Workshop on Analytics for Building-Scale Sustainable Ecosystems, sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and held in Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, June 12–13, 2012. A group of researchers from both the United States and China academic institutions present in this volume their views of bottlenecks in engineering, software, and social sciences, forming a nexus of critical issues impeding wider application of net zero energy building technology in the context of defining building-scale sustainable ecosystems. The focus of these investigations is the fundamentals of sciences that lead to a robust, significant improvement toward modeling and predicting building performance indices such as energy usage with user integration and sustainability. Achievements and challenges in research and development initiatives and best practices from the United States and China provide a foundation for such development of analytics and possibility of benchmarking and comparability. The edited volume divides the topics in the following main parts.