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Overview
The buildings industry is large, fragmented, and diverse. Commercial buildings range from residential-scale small businesses to
large, complex mixed-use structures. Managers, owners, and others who decide whether or not to incorporate energy-efficient and
other new technologies into their buildings are confronted with a complicated set of issues. Although the standard pressures of
time, cost, and risk influence decision making in the commercial sector, more fundamental underlying obstacles to effective
decisions include:
- Lack of an integrated buildings systems perspective, loss of information throughout the building's life cycle,
and poor feedback between operations and design;
- An industry fee and financing structure that emphasizes short-term perspective and economic uncertainties;
- Lack of standard building performance metrics and benchmarking tools and techniques;
- Lack of standard methods for retrofit performance analysis; and
- Lack of standard methods for exchanging data among software programs.
The Life Cycle Tools Program Element focuses on developing integrated information management technologies to improve commercial
building performance.
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- Technical Highlights
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Life Cycle Tools Brochures:
Facilitating access to building performance information for building owners and managers.
Tasks:
Develop a web-based tool for benchmarking whole building energy for California commercial buildings.
Develop a prototype tool that can demonstrate the process of specifying, tracking, and visualizing building performance objectives
and their associated metric data across the life cycle of a building.
Evaluate alternative methods to provide energy bill payers with useful metrics that will encourage comparison of their energy use with that of others.
A simulation tool to give building owners and managers confidence that energy service companies (ESCOs) and other
retrofit agents are using standard assessment techniques that adequately reflect California building types, equipment,
weather, utility costs, and other issues.
Tasks:
The goal is to deliver an operational, updated version of the retrofit tool (now named RESEM-CA).
The objective of this task is to enhance the RESEM-CA software tool with the following capabilities:
- Energy Conservation Measure (ECM) savings analysis
- ECM life-cycle analysis
- Ranking and determination of optimal packages
- Utility rate schedules
- A building template structure
The objective of this task is to enhance the RESEM-CA software tool with the following capabilities and prepare a public
distribution version:
- Simulation engine for new equipment
- ECM savings analysis: Energy Service Performance Contract economics analysis, including alternate (third-party) financing; greening and renewables analyses
- Interoperability: add interoperability capabilities for use with Industrial Foundation Classes
Building energy simulation programs are not widely used because the process of preparing the required data is time
consuming, error prone, and costly. Research on interoperability addresses these problems. "Reusable data" and
interoperable tools are the keys to changing the process by which buildings are designed and operated, across
disciplines and throughout the building life cycle.
Tasks:
The project goal is to extend IFC schemata to support the modeling and simulation of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning
(HVAC) components and systems in various IFC-compatible building simulation tools (such as EnergyPlus).
The objective of this task is to test, validate, finalize, and integrate the IFC schema developed in Task 2.3.1 into the IFC object model.
The objective of this task is to develop an interface between EnergyPlus and the IFC object model that will allow the acquisition of input
data needed to run EnergyPlus simulations directly from IFC-compatible databases and libraries or from software that generates those data.
This interface will also allow users to write information generated by EnergyPlus to IFC project files for direct use by other interoperable software.
Contact:
Mary Ann Piette, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), (510) 486-6286
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