A Systematic Approach to Integrated Building Performance Assessment and Visualisation

Abstract: The aim of this project was to develop a holistic approach to building-performance assessment without limiting it to energy use (usually expressed in kWh/m2/year), but rather include more parameters that represent the following aspects: Economic, environmental, and quality of service provided to the occupant/client. If it can be shown that buildings can be operated not only in an energy-efficient way, but also in a way that takes into consideration the needs of the occupants, a case could be built that a higher quality of indoor environment does not necessarily mean a higher economic impact. It is also important to show that having access to high-quality building-performance data leads to high-quality analysis and visualisation, and consequently to a chance to detect faults and improve building operation. To answer these questions, a large office building in Stockholm, Sweden was used as a case study. The building was equipped with energy meters and 1,700 sensor points, uniformly distributed over the occupied areas, that measured room temperature, duct temperature, occupancy presence/absence and supply airflow, in addition to other states. The data was processed using RStudio, and various types of visualisation plots were used, including carpet plots, masked scatter plots, bar plots, line graphs, and boxplots. The data pointed to some interesting results. First, just knowing the energy use is not sufficient for understanding the quality of the service provided to the occupants. Second, performing a thorough analysis of room unit data can detect faults. Third, using carpet plots for energy-data visualisation is effective for energy-use pattern recognition. Finally, visualising the building performance parameters in a parallel coordinate plot is a more informative representation of integrated building performance compared to the energy performance certificates typically used today.