Emulation of Stochastic Computer Models with an Application to Building Design

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.