Smart buildings promise to revolutionize the way we live. Applications ranging from climate control to fire management can have significant impact on the quality and cost of these services. However, a smart building and any technology with direct effect on the safety of its occupants must undergo extensive testing. Virtual testing by means of computer simulation can significantly reduce the cost of testing and, as a result, accelerate the development of novel applications. Unfortunately, building physically-accurate simulation codes can be labor intensive. To address this problem, we propose a framework for rapid, physically-accurate virtual testing of smart building systems. The proposed framework supports analytical modeling and simulation of both a discrete distributed system as well as the physical environment that hosts it. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.