Scenario modelling: A holistic environmental and energy management method for building operation optimisation

Abstract

Building managers have specific duties and certain outputs that are required of them. Without the necessary data, information, tools, and time, they are unable to adequately meet their organisational goals. Scenario modelling enables explicit and unambiguous coupling of building functions with other pivotal aspects of building operation in a method that specifically considers the education and technical expertise of building managers. This new method captures, transforms, and communicates the complex interdependencies of environmental and energy management in buildings through an easily navigable, holistic, and reproducible checking mechanism that compares actual performance with predicted performance and completes the "plan-docheck-act" cycle for building managers. Most important, the structured nature of this method caters to the diverse profile of building managers, making it applicable for widespread deployment. This paper demonstrates the benefit of using the new method by examining its application to a performance analysis of two existing buildings.

Building performance optimisation: A hybrid architecture for the integration of contextual information and time-series data

“…Building on previous work by Corry et al [8] and O'Donnell et al [9] [11] [21] , the objective of this paper is to show how building context data can be mapped to related performance data. The proposed approach keeps time-series data within its original database, avoiding duplication while benefitting from the high efficiency of mature database platforms, especially for structured fixed data [30,31].…”

“…The performance framework using the scenario modelling method [9] followed on from previous performance metric/indicator work by Hitchcock and Augenbroe [33][34][35]. Additionally, BuildingEQ developed practical measurement and metric sets for buildings [36].…”

“…In order to provide context data for the test case, we converted sensor information, stored in an Excel file, into a RDF file based on rules defined in Table 1. This test case uses a rule-based performance assessment mechanism called the scenario modelling method [9], which can leverage raw or unprocessed data during all phases of the building life cycle. Scenario models present different aspects of building performance in parallel and allow for a more complete or holistic perspective on local and global performance.…”

“…The AEC industry presents some unique challenges to data integration due to the distributed nature of the industry and the presence of many interacting but poorly linked domains. A direct consequence of this is that building managers do not have access to the data and information they need in order to optimally manage buildings [9].…”

An Approach to Energy Management: A Case Study of a Medium Scale Printing Press in Lagos, Nigeria

“…Energy is a chief determinant of production cost and the vagaries in its cost may eventually determine the profitability or folding up of an industry. It is therefore important that a serious energy manager explores all and every means of reducing the energy input [4].…”