A decision support system for the development of voyage and maintenance plans for ships

The waterborne sector faces nowadays significant challenges due to several environmental, financial and other concerns. Such challenges may be addressed, among others, by optimising voyage plans, and diagnosing as early as possible engine failures that may lead to performance degradation. These two issues are addressed by the Decision Support System (DSS) presented herein, which focuses on the operation of merchant ships. For the development of voyage plans, a multicriteria decision problem is developed and handled with the PROMETHE method, while a multivariable control chart is used for the fault diagnosis problem. A MATLAB-based software implementation of the DSS has been developed adopting a modular architecture, while, in order to provide a generic software solution, the required input data are retrieved from dedicated web-services, following specific communication and data exchange protocols

Design of knowledge-based systems for automated deployment of building management services

Despite its high potential, the building's sector lags behind in reducing its energy demand. Tremendous savings can be achieved by deploying building management services during operation, however, the manual deployment of these services needs to be undertaken by experts and it is a tedious, time and cost consuming task. It requires detailed expert knowledge to match the diverse requirements of services with the present constellation of envelope, equipment and automation system in a target building. To enable the widespread deployment of these services, this knowledge-intensive task needs to be automated. Knowledge-based methods solve this task, however, their widespread adoption is hampered and solutions proposed in the past do not stick to basic principles of state of the art knowledge engineering methods. To fill this gap we present a novel methodological approach for the design of knowledge-based systems for the automated deployment of building management services. The approach covers the essential steps and best practices: (1) representation of terminological knowledge of a building and its systems based on well-established knowledge engineering methods; (2) representation and capturing of assertional knowledge on a real building portfolio based on open standards; and (3) use of the acquired knowledge for the automated deployment of building management services to increase the energy efficiency of buildings during operation. We validate the methodological approach by deploying it in a real-world large-scale European pilot on a diverse portfolio of buildings and a novel set of building management services. In addition, a novel ontology, which reuses and extends existing ontologies is presented.The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the generous funding provided by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme through the MOEEBIUS project under grant agreement No. 680517

Using Thermostats for Indoor Climate Control in Office Buildings: The Effect on Thermal Comfort

Thermostats are widely used in temperature regulation of indoor spaces and have a direct impact on energy use and occupant thermal comfort. Existing guidelines make recommendations for properly selecting set points to reduce energy use, but there is little or no information regarding the actual achieved thermal comfort of the occupants. While dry-bulb air temperature measured at the thermostat location is sometimes a good proxy, there is less understanding of whether thermal comfort targets are actually met. In this direction, we have defined an experimental simulation protocol involving two office buildings; the buildings have contrasting geometrical and construction characteristics, as well as different building services systems for meeting heating and cooling demands. A parametric analysis is performed for combinations of controlled variables and boundary conditions. In all cases, occupant thermal comfort is estimated using the Fanger index, as defined in ISO 7730. The results of the parametric study suggest that simple bounds on the dry-bulb air temperature are not sufficient to ensure comfort, and in many cases, more detailed considerations taking into account building characteristics, as well as the types of building heating and cooling services are required. The implication is that the calculation or estimation of detailed comfort indices, or even the use of personalised comfort models, is key towards a more human-centric approach to building design and operation

A platform for automated technical building management services using ontology

The deployment of technical building management services is a requirement to further reduce energy demand of future and existing buildings. Automating the process of configuring and deploying technical building management services such as fault detection and diagnosis of technical equipment seems to be a promising path to intensify the adoption of these services. In this work we present a data processing and analytics execution platform which allows the deployment of ontology-based, automated technical building management services on a large-scale. We present the platform architecture and results from a reference implementation performing rule-based fault detection on offline air handling unit data

A methodology to automatically generate geometry inputs for energy performance simulation from IFC BIM models

Building Energy Performance (BEP) simulation model require significant effort for set up, limiting the potential utilization of modelling both in the design and operational phases. A methodology for semi-automated BEP simulation model creation could make this process much more expedient and as such lower to threshold for the use of such models. Building Information Models (BIM) are an information-rich repository that could be used to streamline and expedite the collection of such information. Concerning the building geometry, the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) can provide static building information that include geometric configuration and material properties, but in a form that might not be directly usable for the generation of thermal simulation models due to the absence of 2nd-level boundary information. In this paper , a three-step methodology for (semi-) automated generation of thermal simulation models is presented, including: a query on the building data model requesting geometry-related information; a processing of the acquired data by a 2nd-level boundary identification algorithm, the Common Boundary Intersection Projection (CBIP) algorithm; and a transformation stage that converts the geometry information of IFC, along with the data obtained from the CBIP algorithm, to an Energy Plus and/or TRNSYS input file, with the latter being the main topic of this paper