Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1
ECM concept reflecting the building and occupants consumption assessment
represented in Fig.
1
. The ultimate goal is to improve the success of investments of
energy-saving solutions in buildings.
1.2 Methodology
For proof of concept, our approach focuses on the utilisation of the lighting system
within the building. Although the lighting system is usually not the system that
consumes the most energy, such as HVAC systems for example, it provides the
greatest opportunity for energy savings.
It should be noted that example of HVAC systems is not structurally very
different from the case developed here. Although occupants can directly control
lighting, it is not expected that they will adjust for example airflow characteristics.
This is usually done by some type of Building Automation Systems controlling the
local variables from a collection of desired set-point values (local or global).
Nevertheless, building occupants do many things that directly affect the overall
energy demand although not necessarily with energy efficiency in mind. In that
case, the events of interest for the proposed approach would be actions such as,
opening and closing windows and blinds, or leaving the heating controls on high
demand when absent from the space.
The building performance and usage auditing could be achieved through an
installed wireless sensor network (WSN) (Jang and Healy
2010
; Menzel et al.
2008
; Spinar et al.
2008
). In our context, the user occupancy assessment is a
repository of events, which represents user actions in the building environment
under regular usage conditions.
In the first approach, the ECM should approximate the energy consumption
prediction P
ECM
to the real building energy consumption
T
P
ECM
ð
t
Þ
dt
¼
Z
T
0
Z
P
B
ð
t
Þ
dt
þ
e
ð
1
Þ
0
