Treating uncertainty in building performance simulation

Uncertainty is a situation which involves imperfect and/or unknown information. As such, it is intrinsically integrated into any simulation process, including building performance simulation. However assessing, mitigating, and managing uncertainty in building performance simulation demands developing special tools that are able to integrate stochastic aspect of uncertainty into simulation. The idea of a special issue devoted to the important topic of uncertainty emerged during the Building Simulation Conference in 2013 in France, where about 40 papers with the keyword uncertainty were presented. Assessing and managing uncertainty appeared then as an emerging and very important topic. It was a correct assumption: in our Journal of Building Performance Simulation, papers integrating uncertainty aspects have become more and more numerous. Between 2008 and 2012, each volume of the journal contained from 7 to 11 articles related to uncertainty, whereas in the past year more than half the published articles address uncertainty in some respect.