Spatio-temporal energy profiling of commercial buildings

Abstract

Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems account for a significant portion of the energy consumed in commercial buildings. In this paper, an energy profiling methodology in a spatio-temporal framework is proposed through the development of a metric (called STEM) to gauge the performance of the HVAC systems. The metric takes into consideration both occupants' comfort and energy consumption, and is based on system identification approaches to find thermodynamic coefficients from measured data. It can be computed purely from data available through building management systems (BMS). The proposed methodology when tested in simulation, provided key spatial and temporal insights on the HVAC performance.