What is the usecase of story in a Pollination model?

[keigonomura]

@mostapha May I know what “Story” is for? I looked into the idf file after energy simulation, but Story is nowhere in the idf file. Is it used only for the room sorting purpose in Rhino and OpenStudio?

[mostapha]

Hi @keigonomura,

Yes. Sorting is one of the obvious use cases in the Rhino interface. And you are correct that it will not be exported to an IDF file.

That said, the story is an important feature in certain cases. These are the two that I can remember:

1. If the model is exported to eQuest (INP), Dragonfly (DFJSON), or IDA ICE (IDM) we use stories to group the rooms for each level.

2. Many of OpenStudio measures rely on the story property to work correctly.

3. If you want to check the RoomOverlapOnly when you run the PO_ValidateModel command, you must set up the stories in Rhino for the command to work.

   

@chriswmackey and @mingbo should be able to add other items that I might have forgotten. I know that we have a command that gives you a warning if the stories are not assigned to the rooms.

[chriswmackey]

You pretty much summarized the main use cases there, @mostapha , and I can’t remember any other reasons. I think this may not be 100% correct though:

@mostapha

I know that we have a command that gives you a warning if the stories are not assigned to the rooms.

None of the validation commands check for whether the model has stories and Honeybee/Pollination models are considered valid without them. But, when we export the model to OpenStudio, we usually auto-generate the stories based on the floor elevations of the Rooms if no existing Story definitions were found. You can see that this happens in the Model To OSM component:

ladybug-tools/honeybee-grasshopper-energy/blob/master/honeybee_grasshopper_energy/src/HB Model to OSM.py#L178-L180

If stories are important for some of the other translators like INP or IDA-ICE, maybe we should perform a similar check as part of the translation process in those packages.

[mostapha]

@mostapha

I know that we have a command that gives you a warning if the stories are not assigned to the rooms.

I just remembered actually. If you want to check the RoomOverlapOnly when you run the PO_ValidateModel command, you must set up the stories in Rhino for the command to work.