Queen’s University

Engineers use mathematical models to describe the production of plastics and other chemicals. The models contain unknown parameters that are estimated from plant data. In the past year, the research team analyzed several criteria that modelers use to decide how complex or how simplified their models should be. They showed that one popular model-selection criterion, the corrected Akaike Information Criterion, tends to select very simple models, and that another, the adjusted coefficient of determination, tends to select models with many parameters.

The building sector is one of the most important energy consumers and CO2 producers. Recent statistics collected in the EU have shown that the building sector accounts for approximately 40% of the energy consumed and 40% of the total CO2 produced. These trends are reflected in both North America and Asia. International organizations such as ISO have developed new measures of building system energy performance.