Improving energy efficiency in buildings is a major priority for the European Union, yet current modelling processes do not accurately reflect consumption. The MOEEBIUS framework will provide the basis for more accurate energy performance assessment, underpinning efforts to improve efficiency and opening up new commercial opportunities, as Dawid Krysiński explains ; H2020 680517 MOEEBIUS.
The continuous growth of renewable energy and the transition to a more de-centralised electricity generation adds significant complexity to balance power supply and demand in the grid. These imbalances are partially compensated by demand response programs, which represent a new business opportunity in the building sector, especially for ESCOs. Including demand response to their traditional energy efficiency-based business model adds an additional revenue stream that could potentially shorten payback periods of energy renovation projects. This paper introduces this new dual-services business model, and evaluates the potential suitability of HVAC, generation and storage technologies to ensure proposed energy efficiency and flexibility goals. ; This paper is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 745594. This paper reflects only the author´s views and neither the Agency nor the Commission are responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein
Over the last several years, a great amount of research work has been focused on the development of model predictive control techniques for the indoor climate control of buildings, but, despite the promising results, this technology is still not adopted by the industry. One of the main reasons for this is the increased cost associated with the development and calibration (or identification) of mathematical models of special structure used for predicting future states of the building. We propose a methodology to overcome this obstacle by replacing these hand-engineered mathematical models with a thermal simulation model of the building developed using detailed thermal simulation engines such as EnergyPlus. As designing better controllers requires interacting with the simulation model, a central part of our methodology is the control improvement (or optimisation) module, facilitating two simulation-based control improvement methodologies: one based in multi-criteria decision analysis methods and the other based on state-space identification of dynamical systems using Gaussian process models and reinforcement learning. We evaluate the proposed methodology in a set of simulation-based experiments using the thermal simulation model of a real building located in Portugal. Our results indicate that the proposed methodology could be a viable alternative to model predictive control-based supervisory control in buildings. ; Research leading to these results has been partially supported by the Modelling Optimization of Energy Efficiency in Buildings for Urban Sustainability (MOEEBIUS) project. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 680517. Georgios Giannakis and Dimitrios Rovas gratefully acknowledge financial support from the European Commission H2020-EeB5-2015 project "Optimised Energy Efficient Design Platform for Refurbishment at District Level" under Contract #680676 (OptEEmAL). Georgios Kontes and Christopher Mutschler gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany in the framework of Machine Learning Forum (grant number 01IS17071). Georgios Kontes, Natalia Panagiotidou, Simone Steiger and Gunnar Gruen gratefully acknowledge use of the services and facilities of the Energie Campus Nürnberg. The APC was funded by MOEEBIUS project. This paper reflects only the authors' views and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.
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.