BuildingSync: A schema for commercial building energy audit data exchange (original) (raw)
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Buildings
The European Commission has mandated the use of digital building logbooks (DBL) to encourage deep energy renovations and overcome barriers in building renovations. The current energy performance certificates (EPCs) focus on operational energy consumption, whereas the DBL will cover the entire life cycle of buildings and provide a more comprehensive evaluation of buildings, through providing a passport rating in three domains: energy performance, sustainability, and smartness. This paper defines the digital building logbook (DBL) data structure within the context of the EUB SuperHub, a three-year project financed by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 program. The creation of the EUB SuperHub DBL data structure involved an extensive review of relevant literature, including existing DBL data structures developed in previous EU projects (iBRoad, ALDREN, BIM4EEB, X-tendo), recommendations from the “Study on the Development of an EU Framework for Buildings’ Digital Logbook”, requir...
A key impediment to improving the energy efficiency and reducing the environmental impact of buildings is the complexity and cost of managing information over the life cycle of a building. A surprisingly large fraction of the total cost of buildings is embodied in the decision making and information management process due to the structure of the building industry, the numerous people and companies involved in the process, the current nature of the building acquisition process, and the long time periods over which buildings operate once design and construction are completed. We suggest that new interoperable software tools could greatly facilitate and rationalize this complex process, thereby reducing time and cost, and greatly improving the habitability and environmental impact of these buildings. We describe a series of projects in which we are building and testing several prototype toolkits as part of a building life-cycle information system that will allow interoperable software tools to function more effectively throughout the design, construction, commissioning, and operations phases.
Proceedings of Building Simulation 2019: 16th Conference of IBPSA
BIM models are seldom used for energy certification of buildings. This paper discusses the advantages of linking two important fields; Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Building Environmental Assessment Methods (BEAM), better known as a rating system. The state-ofthe-art in both fields around the world is discussed, with an in-depth examination of current BIM software and related applications, followed by a discussion about previous research for integrating them. Finally, a new framework is proposed based on database exchange that takes crucial information from BIM to BEAM platforms. The development of this method includes BIM programming, database links, and spreadsheets for building energy certification. This new semi-automatic tool allows architects to model their design in the BIM platform and use this information as an input for the energy certification process. The potential and risks of this method are discussed. BPS software in brief DesignBuilder, TAS, Daysim, Green Building Studio, and IES_VE, are the most well-known software packages, among others, (see Figure 2) (
An overview of data tools for representing and managing building information and performance data
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2021
Building information modeling (BIM) has been widely adopted for representing and exchanging building data across disciplines during building design and construction. However, BIM's use in the building operation phase is limited. With the increasing deployment of low-cost sensors and meters, as well as affordable digital storage and computing technologies, growing volumes of data have been collected from buildings, their energy services systems, and occupants. Such data are crucial to help decision makers understand what, how, and when energy is consumed in buildings-a critical step to improving building performance for energy efficiency, demand flexibility, and resilience. However, practical analyses and use of the collected data are very limited due to various reasons, including poor data quality, ad-hoc representation of data, and lack of data science skills. To unlock value from building data, there is a strong need for a toolchain to curate and represent building information and performance data in common standardized terminologies and schemas, to enable interoperability between tools and applications. This study selected and reviewed 24 data tools based on common use cases of data across the building life cycle, from design to construction, commissioning, operation, and retrofits. The selected data tools are grouped into three categories: (1) data dictionary or terminology, (2) data ontology and schemas, and (3) data platforms. The data are grouped into ten typologies covering most types of data collected in buildings. This study resulted in five main findings: (1) most data representation tools can represent their intended data typologies well, such as Green Button for smart meter data and Brick schema for metadata of sensors in buildings and HVAC systems, but none of the tools cover all ten types of data; (2) there is a need for data schemas to represent the basis of design data and metadata of occupant data; (3) standard terminologies such as those defined in BEDES are only adopted in a few data tools; (4) integrating data across various stages in the building life cycle remains a challenge; and (5) most data tools were developed and maintained by different parties for different purposes, their flexibility and interoperability can be improved to support broader use cases. Finally, recommendations for future research on building data tools are provided for the data and buildings community based on the FAIR principles to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Highlights: • Building information and performance data are grouped into 10 typologies • 24 data tools are selected, categorized into 3 groups (terminology, ontology/schema, platform), and reviewed • Most of these tools can be further enhanced to improve flexibility, standardization, and interoperability 2 • Ontologies or schema to represent metadata of occupants and basis of building design need to be developed • Integrating building data across the building life cycle to support various use cases remains a challenge
Data Sharing for Sustainable Building Assessment
International Journal of Architectural Computing, 2012
Sustainable design assessment requires information, which is aggregated from different phases of a building design, and evaluated according to criteria specified in a ‘sustainable building rating system.’ In the architecture engineering and construction (AEC) domain much of the necessary information is available through open source data standards such as Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). However, no single standard that provides support for sustainability assessment completely suffices as a data structure. This paper explores the augmentation of the Construction Operations Building information exchange (COBie) model, as an intermediary data structure, to bridge between requirements of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system and a building information model. Development of a general framework for data sharing and information management for LEED assessments is illustrated through an implementation of a prototype using functional databases. The prototype...
Procedia Engineering, 2015
Supporting the development of a strong evidence bas e on which to improve the energy performance of buildings requires having access to research from different 'levels' of data. This includes high-level studies to carefully constructed representative samples, exploratory and investigative studies. As sensors and data collection becomes more widely applied within buildings (and the broader built environment) a clear articulation of the potential benefits and risks of data access is needed to avoid unintended consequences and regressive positions to data access. The objective of this work is to identify and discuss the co-benefits of energy and built environment data and the mechanisms needed to enable them. We outline a number of potential benefits and limitations of making energy and buildings data more widely available. Access to and linking/ matching together data can provide numerous benefits, including: research benefits, education and training, academic benefits, funder benefits, policy benefits , among others. However, there are also concerns of making data accessible including: privacy, management of access and communication protocols, commercial sensitivity, intellectual property, and archiving and legacy repository. The mechanisms needed to support data access should include requirements from funders for long-term data management and sharing, funding available for data archaeology, journal requirements for publication, government support and evaluation requests, and industry interest in capturing wider benefits from proprietary data.
BIM-based workflow for energy audits
Proceedings of the 2022 European Conference on Computing in Construction
Energy audits play a crucial role in energy retrofit projects for existing buildings, as the accuracy and completeness of the collected data strongly affect the reliability of the design energy model. The present paper thus proposes a new BIM (Building Information Modelling)-based workflow to better manage data collection in an energy audit process, to minimize data losses and inconsistencies. The proposed framework is based on the use of a simplified BIM Model, linked to an external database (for data storing) and to a webpage (for in-situ data acquisition). This can be used as a geometrical and nongeometrical data container to implement a reliable model for energy simulations. The efficacy of the presented BIM-workflow has been successfully validated through a survey on window fixtures for a real case study.
G 210 A Building Audit Software to Support Energy Management and Conservation
2014
Energy audit is one of the plausible efforts to do in energy conservation. This article describes the design and development of a tool being purposed to help in analyzing energy audit data of a building. Some requirements to provide for the success of the task include the knowledge of audit data parameters as well as their computation procedures, the mastering of the programming language to be used, and also logical analysis and criticism to the results of program codes execution. Visual C++ under Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) of Microsoft is used as the programming language. Data of four categories of buildings, representing university-, religious-, junior high school-, and kindergarten-buildings are used. The obtained results show that using the chosen programming language and development environment, instruction codes should be grouped as declaration files containing the definition of variables and prototypes names to be used, and implementation files con...
Building energy information systems: user case studies
Energy Efficiency, 2010
Measured energy performance data are essential to national efforts to improve building efficiency, as evidenced in recent benchmarking mandates, and in a growing body of work that indicates the value of permanent monitoring and energy information feedback. This paper presents case studies of energy information systems (EIS) at four enterprises and university campuses, focusing on the attained energy savings, and successes and challenges in technology use and integration. EIS are broadly defined as performance monitoring software, data acquisition hardware, and communication systems to store, analyze and display building energy information. Case investigations showed that the most common energy savings and instances of waste concerned scheduling errors, measurement and verification, and inefficient operations. Data quality is critical to effective EIS use, and is most challenging at the subsystem or component level, and with non-electric energy sources. Sophisticated prediction algorithms may not be well understood but can be applied quite effectively, and sites with custom benchmark models or metrics are more likely to perform analyses external to the EIS. Finally, resources and staffing were identified as a universal challenge, indicating a need to identify additional models of EIS use that extend beyond exclusive in-house use, to analysis services.
Energy Auditing for Efficient Planning and Implementation in Commercial and Residential Buildings
Advances in Civil Engineering
The ideology of ensuring energy-efficient design and construction of buildings by providing minimum requirements is the core objective of this work. Energy audit was conducted to improve the design of the building with incremental requirements to further enhance the energy efficiency. The Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) has been modified extensively over the years, starting from its initial deployment in the year 2011 to its latest modifications in the year 2019. The energy conservation standards in ECBC apply to building envelope, heating ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, service water heating, and electric power distribution. It should also be ensured that all-electric systems, transformers, energy-efficient motors, and diesel generators must meet the regulated set of mandatory requirements. From among the various software types that have been approved for ECBC design and application, this study has employed Energy Plus software to simulate the design based on the ...