Licaso Has Arrived! Annual daylight simulation software for AGi32 and ElumTools

For professional lighting designers and architects who use AGI32 and/or ElumTools (my firm uses both) you now have a new opportunity to perform climate-based annual daylight simulations, including the calculation of annual daylight metrics. This can be accomplished with Lighting Analysist's newest offering; LICASOⓇ.

Product description from the Licaso website (www.Licaso.com):

• Given an AGi32 or ElumTools/Revit environment, Licaso can compute workplane illuminance for every daylit hour of every day for an entire year. From these calculations a wide variety of annual daylight metrics can be accumulated. These include: various flavors of Daylight Autonomy (Minimum, Maximum, Basic, Continuous, Spatial), Useful Daylight Illuminance, Annual Sunlight Exposure, Annual Daylight Exposure, and Average, Maximum and Minimum illuminance. Presentation options include graphical Spatial Maps (2D or superimposed on a rendered view), Temporal Maps, Temporal Map Charts and rendered views of specific times and dates. Any/all of these can be included with statistical summaries in a flexible and user formatted report.

The image below is my Law Office model, used in two of my Revit textbooks, with Annual Sunlight Exposure (ASE) spatial maps in the Rooms. 

Law Office model with ASE spatial maps in the rooms

In the Licaso environment, once the calculation is complete, there are several ways in which the results can be viewed. In the image below, notice the Pass/Fail column for the selected metric!

For a sort of whitepaper and validation statement, check out this All Things Lighting blog post by Ian Ashdown, P. Eng. FIES: LICASO and DAYSIM (2/11/2017).

A quote from this blog post:

• LICASO is the first climate-based annual daylight simulation software program that is not based on Radiance. More than this, it is not even based on the Radiance computational model of ray tracing. Rather, it relies on proven radiosity methods,1 and in particular the algorithms that have been driving Lighting Analysts’ AGi32™ and ElumTools™ lighting design and analysis software products for nearly two decades. (See Lighting Analysts’ blog article Climate-Based Daylight Modeling for further details.)

I plan on using this tool to help validate design solutions for Minnesota’s B3 Guidelines and the WELL Building Standard. Additionally, the goal is to use Licaso to help inform our designs, not just document the outcomes.

The fruits of a BIM ecosystem are continuing to grow and blossom!