Development and application of CONTAM APIs

A set of application programming interfaces (APIs) has been developed for the whole-building contaminant transport and airflow modeling software program, CONTAM. One API allows for the creation and modification of CONTAM building models to be incorporated into modelling workflows, and another allows other simulation tools and programming environments to dynamically link to and run CONTAM building models, interactively control their execution, and query for simulation results. These new APIs simplify the incorporation of CONTAM within building design and analysis frameworks and co-simulation workflows, and open possibilities for extending the current capabilities of CONTAM. We present an overview and motivation of these APIs and examples of their use, including development of a custom control algorithm, an enhanced sorption model, and integration with a three-dimensional architectural design platform and urban scale analysis tools.