Metracker - More Details

A Year 2 Final Report on Standardized Building Performance Metrics was distributed for review to a wide selection of reviewers within the USDOE"s Performance Metric Workshops, LBNL staff, and the Element 2 Technical Advisory Group. The report begins with an overview of performance metrics tracking concepts and the implementation of these concepts in Metracker. The report then gives a review of several existing building performance frameworks that include energy as one dimension of overall building performance. Four sets of energy related metrics that have been developed by various efforts are then presented as candidates for standardization within a given building project or application. A copy of this report is available under the Deliverables section of the Metracker main page.

Also, collaboration discussions have been initiated with researchers involved in the Labs21 Design Intent Tool and Laboratory Benchmarking activities, as well as other potential collaborators.

Documentation:
The current Metracker documentation consists of two documents, a software reference manual and a software specifications document. The Metracker Reference Manual begins with a background discussion of the underlying performance metric data model concepts and their usage scenario. The remainder of the manual gives details of the implementation and use of Metracker. This document was largely written prior to beginning the High Performance Commercial Building Systems PIER program.

The software specifications document includes general background information on the purpose behind developing Metracker, targeted users, and important features of the software prototype. The second section of this document describes the organization and structure of Metracker, and is structured to fulfill the model diagram deliverable for Year 1. The document then identifies the software enhancements for Metracker and the plan for implementing these requirements. The document ends with a working draft of a potential scenario for demonstrating the application of Metracker concepts across the life cycle of a building project. This document was completed and internally reviewed by March 2001, and has been sent out for external review by selected TAG members whose comments were collected at the end of Year 1.

The second activity focused on implementing the identified Year 1 enhancements to Metracker Version 1.0. The IFC import/export capabilities have been updated to Releases 1.5.1 and 2.0 of the IFC standard. This effort has also involved interaction with Olof Granlund, developer of an IFC software toolbox called BSPro COM Server, to guide development of BSPro so that it can support Metracker requirements. A preliminary method for importing performance metric data from the standard EnergyPlus output data files was also implemented. Metracker data visualization capabilities have been enhanced. Work began on identifying and implementing a set of performance metrics with metric data format standards.

Contact: Robert Hitchcock, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), (202) 646-7959