Overview

This page gives information on obtaining various distributions of the COMIS multizone simulation program. It describes:

• The background of COMIS, and the various distributions available.
• Disclaimers of what LBNL can, and cannot, provide.
• Available downloads of LBNL's source code and executables.
• Version information about changes to the LBNL distribution.

While we make some distributions of COMIS available for public download, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [disclaimer needed].

Background on COMIS Distributions

COMIS development began with an international group of scientists, participating in workshop held at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1988-1989. In 1990, control of the process passed on to Annex 23 of the International Energy Agency. Annex 23 was formed to study and validate multizone airflow and pollutant transport models. This working group, with participants from nine nations (Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United States), continued COMIS development through 1996.

After Annex 23 disbanded, the official COMIS source code was handed off to the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (EMPA). In conjunction with the French Scientific Center for Building Physics (CSTB), EMPA maintains a commercial distribution of COMIS.

Meanwhile, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory continued to develop COMIS for its own research purposes. Through the fall of 1991, these changes mainly involved bug fixes, plus a major re-write of the airflow solver. All those changes appear in the commercial version of COMIS.

However, starting in 2002, LBNL began modifications to the program that required nontrivial restructuring of its source code. These changes made the LBNL distribution of COMIS incompatible with both the original public-domain version of COMIS, and the newer commercial version.

To distinguish this new thread of COMIS development, the working LBNL code is known as s_comis.

In summary, several distributions of COMIS are available:

• The original public-domain distribution, COMIS version 3.0.2. The source code is available, but no longer supported or maintained.
• The commercial distribution, COMIS version 3.1, built from the original public-domain code. This version has many users, plus an active discussion group. The license fee covers both user help and a Windows-only graphical interface called IISiBat.
• The s_comis distribution, maintained by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This version also builds on the original public-domain code.

Disclaimers

The version information here describes only revisions made at LBNL.

Unfortunately, in the absence of a joint research agreement, the Airflow and Pollutant Transport Group is not able to provide non-LBNL users with support for the code and executables found on this web site. For help getting started with COMIS, or advice on multizone modeling issues, please contact CSTB for information about the commercial distribution of COMIS.

This document was prepared as an account of work sponsored by the United States Government. While this document is believed to contain correct information, neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor The Regents of the University of California, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by its trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof, or The Regents of the University of California. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof, or The Regents of the University of California.

Downloads

This page is currently under construction.

Version Information

COMIS Version: 3.02 (mod LBNL 25 October 2001)

Last LBNL modification of the public-domain version 3.0.2 source code.

s_comis, release-1.0 (?)

Duplicates source code from COMIS version 3.0.2. Renamed to identify fork in development.

s_comis, release-2.0 (2003.10.02_1)

Makes the following changes to the input file:

• In the &-PR-SIMU section, removed keyword POL ##. The value entered here did not affect the simulation.
• In the &-PR-SIMU section, added keyword POL_CALC_STEP_MIN ##. Forces the pollutant transport solver to increase its step length if necessary. If this value is not specified, defaults to its original hard-coded value of one second.
• In the &-PR-SIMU section, renamed keyword POLSTEP to POL_REPORT_STEP.

Makes the following code improvements:

• Pollutant transport solver now stops checking for convergence as soon as it finds a zone that has not converged. This reduces time spent checking convergence.
• Pollutant transport solver now rounds up, rather than down, to determine the number of time steps to take. This decreases the length of each time step, improving the accuracy.
• Moves all source code from Fortran-77 to Fortran-90 format, and reorganizes code into logically-related modules.
• Replaces the error-handling subsystem, in order to support running COMIS as a subroutine of a larger program (e.g., for whole-building energy simulation, or as part of an outdoor pollutant transport problem). In particular, now passes errors up the call-chain heirarchy, rather than printing the error to file and exiting. No longer creates an error file if no errors are reported. Error file now has same base name as the simulation file.

Fixes the following errors:

• Schedule with a name like "Qs1" could be used instead of a desired schedule "Qs10" or "Qs1a".
• Default values for unspecified user inputs got scaled as if the user had directly entered an input. Thus, if the user specified input in units other than the native calculation units (e.g., inches water rather than Pascal), then any missing inputs got filled in with default values, but scaled into the wrong units.
• Unit conversion for input source and sink schedules got applied twice.