Ubiquitous Dynamic Building Performance Monitoring

The proposed research effort aims at the development of a seamless multi-layered architecture for concurrent energy, performance, and occupancy data acquisition and processing in buildings. Moreover, the essential potential of such a high-resolution, integrated, and dynamic data-acquisition for supporting energy and performance optimization applications are to be demonstrated via system development and prototypical implementation. Monitored data streams are i) Energy use (submetering), ii) Indoor environment, iii) External environment, iv) Occupants` presence, actions, and feedback, v) Environmental control systems states, vi) Economical information. There is currently a paucity of systematic and comprehensive implementations of monitoring infrastructures in buildings. Thus, the critical benefits that will result from the integrated and concurrent analysis of all building data streams are not exploited. These benefits are i) Energy optimization through improved management of technical building systems. ii) Increased awareness of building users regarding their impact on buildings` energy use. iii) Early detection (and recovery) of deficiencies and malfunctions in energy systems and devices, thus effectively supporting a preventive maintenance regime. iv) Successive building performance improvement and optimization via the analyses of dynamically updated building energy and performance data bases. v) Long-term accumulation of empirical information on buildings` energy and environmental performance toward improving the design, construction, and operation of existing and new buildings. The project is expected to span over two years, jointly executed by Vienna University of Technology (VUT, Austria) & National Cheng Kung University (NCKU, Taiwan). The research will demonstrate the structure and functionality of the dynamic multi-layered data acquisition and processing via a prototypical realization. The results (including testing and evaluation protocols) will be structured in terms of a model process for the installation and operation of comprehensive real-time energy, environmental, and occupancy monitoring system toward improving the energy efficiency, ecological sustainability, and occupational quality of buildings.

In most countries the energy consumption of buildings represents a significant part of the overall energy usage. To run buildings with optimal operation regimes, information about actual energy consumers, user requirements and current building control actions is critical. However, the presence of appropriate sensing, data-storage, and data-processing capabilities is almost entirely absent in the vast majority of existing buildings. Even new buildings mostly miss the possibility to process and analyse building data in an appropriate way.The project deals with possible monitoring infrastructures to collect and process building data (energy use, comfort parameter, etc.) in real-time. Such data can be, of course, applied for various purposes. Toward this end, a technology and vendor independent toolkit, consisting of five components (Connector, Database, Data-Abstraction Framework, MATLAB Framework, Visualization Framework), was developed. The toolkit facilitates beneficial use of building data in various processing applications. It provides powerful pre-processing functions (e.g., generation of temporally structured data sets), offers interfaces for batch processing (MySQL, OPC-UA, etc.) and includes applications for data aggregation, display, visualization, and analysis (e.g. psychrometric and thermal comfort chart plots, data encapsulation and export, etc.).To probe and gauge the utility of the toolkit in a realistic and practical context, two distinct buildings were used for reference implementation. One is a new building, with some existing monitoring infrastructure elements. The project findings illustrates how this building's data can be accessed using the toolkit, by connecting to all kinds of building automation infrastructures. The second building is more than hundred years old and provides no reusable building automation infrastructure. Therefore, an independent system needed to be installed for monitoring.