Combining spaces into thermal zones in e+ and OS

A few related questions about combining multiple spaces into a thermal zone in EnergyPlus and OpenStudio:

When (which version) did EnergyPlus introduce the concept of being able to group multiple spaces into thermal zones?
Is this feature commonly used in e+? Most of the example files that ship with e+ still model only the Zone objects and do not utilize the Space object (but there are a handful of example files that do).
Does the OpenStudio SDK use this representation in the IDF when translating to e+, or does it use its own approach to combine multiple spaces into zones?

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Dimitri C

asked 2023-03-24 11:25:01 -0500

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Spaces were introduced in EnergyPlus 9.6. As for the other questions, I don't know.

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ericmartinpe

answered 2023-03-24 18:55:06 -0500

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2) It's not yet commonly used since the feature is pretty new and many users and software tools have not yet tried taking advantage of it.

3) OpenStudio currently has experimental support for translating to E+ spaces (instead of E+ zones). You can use it by manually calling ForwardTranslator::setExcludeSpaceTranslation(false) before calling ForwardTranslator::translateModel(Model&) or passing the CLI argument --space-translation to the run method (eg: openstudio run --space-translation -w workflow.osw). In a future version of OpenStudio (potentially v3.7 in November), it's expected that OpenStudio will change from opt-in to opt-out.