The Fifth Energy in Time Steering Committee

The Fifth Energy in Time Steering Committee was held on April 19th and 20th in Levi, Finland. The Levi Panorama Hotel at which the meeting was conducted was chosen on purpose, for this is one of the demo-sites at which monitoring of energy consumption of the building is enabled through one of the technological solutions developed under the EiT project and how it helps by reaching energy efficiency of the hotel.
The Committee had the opportunity to see in situ the operation of many different energy systems of the hotel, discuss and analyze the results. Besides that, several leaders of the different work packages presented the advances achieved in their respective areas, spoke about eventual mishaps and possible solutions to them to ensure feasibility of the integral solution of the EiT project.
The main objectives of the Fifth Steering Meeting were to coordinate the various modules through the working tables and let the members of the technical areas of the committee review the protocols for data entry and output of the different components of the final application. The managers of the areas of dissemination and exploitation showed the advances made in the creation of communication & marketing plans as well as in the market analysis of the different key exploitation results.
Finally, Belén Gómez, The Energy In Time project Leader, offered a general vision of the project status and explained the next milestones for the project to face for the next 6 months until the Sixth Steering Committee planned for November 2016.

Sustainable Places 2016.

EiT participated in the European workshop ‘Sustainable Places 2016’ focusing on Energy Efficiency at Buildings

Several organizations members of EiT, Energy in Time, took part in the workshop Sustainable Places 2016 held in Aglet, France, on June 29-July 1. This is an annual event co-organized by resilient and performer projects focused on sustainability through energy efficiency on different urban elements: cities, districts and buildings.

EiT, fitting perfectly in this theme, made different presentations focusing on integrative character of the project for building control and reporting on prediction as an analysis of  indoor comfort conditions and user behavior performance and automated fault detection & diagnostics. Besides that, the team spoke about Decision Support method for building mid-long term analysis which integrates a dynamic energy simulation model, a LCA method and a LCC algorithm, and Data Mining techniques. The workshop also contained a practical part which allowed the participants to learn from the four EiT demo sites (buildings including an airport, offices and test labs, a commercial and office building, and a hotel) in different climatic areas: Bucharest (Romania), Faro (Portugal), Helsinki and Levi (Finland).

The goals of EiT are to maximize the performance and energy management, improve the efficiency of building operational plans and the lifetime and efficiency of energy equipment and installations. Up to date, no other energy efficient tool or solution has been developed to be applied in nonresidential buildings. The use of the control methods proposed to operate existing building energy systems will result on 20% saving over previous energy consumption.

The workshop concluded with many questions from different viewpoints of the participants such as representatives from industrial companies, RTD performers, specialised SMEs in the field of consultancy, building maintenance, design and energy management offices, investors and professionals form the building sector are targets of the session, and technology providers. Networking, as a complementary part to presentations, provided an additional and necessary time and space to discuss particular topics and questions in details. And finally, as a part of social programme, the participants were offered an exclusive dinner to farewell the event.

Audience 2 COVER_5 EiT leaflets Workshop room 1_Belén Gomez-Uribarri 2_ACCIONA 1_Belén Gomez-Uribarri_ACCIONA 2_Jesús Campaña_U Granada 3_Anarta Gosh_UTRC 4_Tejaswinee_U Lorraine 5_Benoit Vinot_CSTB 6_Heikki Rostila_CAVERION 20160630_161754 20160630_161815 20160630_162205 20160630_162231 20160630_214123 Audience 1

 

Energy in time Workshop at Sustainable places 2016 congress

How to get energy and cost savings during buildings operation and maintenance?

09:00

Energy IN TIME (EiT) project presentation:

Filling the gap between actual and predicting assumptions

Up to 90% of the buildings’ life cycle carbon emissions occur during their operational phase, mainly as consequence of the HVAC, lighting and appliances’ energy use. This phase also represents 80% of building’s life-cycle cost of which 50% is consequence of the energy use. Therefore, energy and cost saving strategies addressing the building operation phase have a major impact in the building life cycle cost.

The European project Energy IN TIME (EiT), started in October 2013 and funded by European Commission, is developing a Smart Energy Simulation-Based Control method to reduce the energy consumption and energy bill in the operational stage of existing non-residential buildings. The new techniques are based on the prediction of indoor comfort conditions and user behavior performance to improve the lifetime and efficiency of energy equipment and installations through continuous commissioning and predictive maintenance. A control tool will be implemented in the building energy management systems to be automatically and remotely operated.  Additionally, four demo sites will give credible evidence of the benefits of the application of this innovative approach for buildings operation and maintenance. The use of these control methods to operate existing building energy systems will result on 20% saving over previous energy consumption.

About the speaker

Belén Gómez-Uribarri

Engineer by the University of Sevilla. She is part of the installations department at ACCIONA R&D as In-House Consultant. She has worked on engineering field, carrying out projects related to Renewable Energy Sources and Energy Efficiency. She has experience in coordinating European funding Programs as she was involved in the set up of Münchner Energy Agentur and Agencia Local de Sevilla under the SAVEII Program. She is participating at several EU R&D projects in energy efficiency and RES fields like Messib, and some projects at national scope like EDEArenov, also in energy efficiency in building field.

 

09:20

EiT integrated solution for building control

The buildings’ energy demand and consumption is influenced by internal and external factors to the building. Different aspects such as design, construction materials, climate, building usage or users’ behaviour, directly affect energy performance. Normally, these factors are strongly considered at the building design and planning stage. However, operational plans are usually based on fixed schedules, sometimes manually modified by operators, which do not use the knowledge of changing conditions to improve the design of operational plans.

Energy simulations and calculations done at the design stage (at theoretical level) will often differ from the actual energy performance of the building. The use of virtual operating models of the buildings allows for tightly calibrated building conditions at any point in time, enabling a realistic representation and simulation. This can be accomplished by updating the models with information obtained from the building monitoring.

This approach makes possible the prediction of building’s demand and operation conditions providing low deviation with respect to the actual conditions. Additionally, other kind of information such as weather forecasts and building occupancy can be loaded in the models, obtaining predictions closer to the reality. Taking into account the state of the simulation it is possible to design highly efficient operational plans.

After implementing the operational plans, the Simulation Based Control will correlate inputs provided by simulations with the actual information obtained from the building monitoring. Then, the Simulation Based Control, through the deviations detected by comparison, will be able to identify building zones or equipment where a sub-optimal performance is occurring. The Simulation Based Control will analyse the causes for these system inefficiencies and implement the corrective measures required.

Model On-Demand Control adjusts the optimal operational plans deviations due to changes in real-time external/internal data compared to the forecasted data used. Deviations between operational plans and real operation due to changes in equipment performance will be detected and treated by Fault-Adaptive Control.

Through analysis and exploitation of the historical data generated and stored on the EiT System new support tools for long term decision making and for medium term predictive maintenance are in development.

About the speaker

Jesús Campaña GómezComputer Engineer and researcher at the University of Granada where he obtained the MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science. He has participated in several research projects related to data management. His research experience includes Intelligent Information Systems, Knowledge Representation, Semantic Web, Data Mining and Big Data. He has co-authored over 20 publications in international journals and conferences on these topics.

09:30
Automatic operational plans generation

The development of operational plans based on energy management strategies requires certain information and technical knowledge that is not always available. Building operation anomalies cannot easily be detected without direct measurement of indoor and outdoor loads (which is not always feasible). Moreover, the impact assessment of alternative operational plans or corrective actions is usually not performed, unless considerable time and effort is spent in energy audits and/or simulations.

Simulation or Model Based Control can be used for maximizing the performance as well as improving the efficiency of building operational plans.

Taking a calibrated model representing the most accurate conditions of the building in a certain time frame and using advanced algorithms, it is possible to test the effect of different operational plans in the building, while minimizing energy consumption and associated cost and satisfying energy demand and comfort restrictions. The operational plan selected as the optimal for the building conditions, consists in a set of instructions (or setpoints) to be executed by the BEMS in a given future time period (the time for which the simulation is run). These instructions are nearly optimal in terms of pre-defined key performance indicators according to the expected building conditions for the operation period.

The building control policy can be adapted to the actual operating conditions, and to failure events by tuning the setpoints of the current operational plan. In this way, the impact of deviations between the predicted building conditions that led to the operational plan and the current building conditions is reduced.

About the speaker

Jesús Campaña GómezComputer Engineer and researcher at the University of Granada where he obtained the MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science. He has participated in several research projects related to data management. His research experience includes Intelligent Information Systems, Knowledge Representation, Semantic Web, Data Mining and Big Data. He has co-authored over 20 publications in international journals and conferences on these topics.

09:50
Building HVAC Fault Detection & Diagnostics

It is well studied that HVAC fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) has a huge potential for cost saving through efficient energy management, timely maintenance scheduling and increasing system up time. Numerous studies have been done to investigate the impact of automated fault detection and diagnostics algorithms in the context of energy savings and other benefits. For example: “poorly maintained, degraded and improperly controlled equipment wastes an estimated 15% to 30% of energy used in commercial buildings. Much of this waste can be prevented with wide spread adoption of automated condition based maintenance.” – Methods for Fault Detection, Diagnostics and Prognostics for Building Systems – A Review, Part 1. IJ HVAC&R, Vol. 11, No. 1, Jan 2005. As a part of the Energy IN TIME project United Technologies Research Center Ireland has developed a hybrid data and physics based methodologies to detect and diagnose faults in building HVAC components. The developed technologies were tested with real test building data with highly promising results.

About the speaker

Anarta GhoshDr. Anarta Ghosh is a Staff Research Scientist at United Technology Research Centre Ireland (UTRC-I). His fields of expertise are Data Analytic, Machine Learning and Computer Vision. His current research interests are: building energy management, system and equipment level fault detection & diagnosis and PHM (Prognostics and Health Management) in the aerospace domain. He has more than 13 years academic and industry experience in the field of decision support (machine learning, statistical pattern recognition data mining), cognitive computer vision and image/signal processing and over 20 publications in these areas in high impact journals and conferences.

10:10

Fault-adaptive control for VAV damper stuc in a multizone building

Variable-air-volume (VAV) boxes are widely used in heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems of buildings as they offer energy efficient operation.  Despite their great flexibility, VAVs are prone to failures and may impact adversely the energy consumption of the building and also the thermal comfort of zones. This presentation states a potential effective approach to fault adaptive control for damper stuck fault in the VAV box to achieve reduced energy consumption. The adaptation of the controller to the fault is achieved by online modification of the constraints in the model predictive control. The proposed fault-adaptive control law is discussed for a four-zones building benchmark.

About the speaker

Image-Tejaswinee

Ms. Tejaswinee Darure is a PhD student in CRAN-CNRS, Université de Lorraine Nancy France. Her current research interest is energy optimization for large scale buildings with receding horizon control. She has completed masters in Process Control from College of Engineering Pune (COEP) India and have experience in industrial automation and control. 

 

 

11:00
Decision support method for building mid-long term analysis

A prototype of decision support tool has been developed to help facility managers in designing and assessing mid-long term building energy renovation scenarii for the Faro airport pilot site. The methodology used in the tool includes: a) a dynamic energy simulation model (COMETh), b) a LCA method which reads EPD of construction products, and c) a LCC algorithm. These 3 models and methods exploit inputs extracted from a BIM file (quantities and metrics). Previously, a BIM file has been made for the terminal building of the FARO airport. Several decision criteria (8) are computed for each scenario: final annual energy consumption, total initial investment, net present value, global warming potential, total primary energy consumption, total waste, total water consumption and Return on investment (ROI). A scenario, also called alternative, is composed of maximum 13 elementary renovation solutions, suggested by the tool. DST is designed to be easy to use and to perform fast simulations (about 15s per simulation). Once batch simulations are over, detailed results are displayed, either tabular or graphical. Three multi-criteria ranking methods are embedded in the tool, as optional modules, to help the users to rank the selected alternatives.

The tool is developed in both C# and Python languages. The first one targets Facility managers with an easy-to-use GUI, the second targets R&D applications such as mono and multi-objective optimization algorithms.

 

About the speaker

Benoît VinotResearch engineer– Dept. Head of I2L division. Benoit VINOT graduated as Engineer specialist in energy, construction and computer sciences. At CSTB, he worked on several national and European research projects on building energy modelling, advanced thermal design, and optimal control of combined passive and active system in low energy building.

 

11:20
Data mining for improving building operation
Data Mining aims to build systems and algorithms to discover knowledge, detect patterns, and generate useful insights and predictions from large-scale data. It encompasses the whole data analysis process, which begins with data extraction and cleaning, and extends to data analysis, description, and summarization. The result is the prediction of new values and their visualization.

Data mining algorithms can be use to extract useful knowledge from the large amount of building and energy data collected during the operational stage.

Data Mining techniques are used to provide support and improve different aspects of Energy Efficiency and Management. We distinguish several categories:

(1) predicting the energy demand required for the efficient operation of a building;
(2) optimizing building operation;
(3) verifying the operational status and failures of building equipment and networks;
(4) analysing the economic and commercial impact of user energy consumption;
(5) detecting and preventing energy fraud.

About the speaker

Computer Engineer and researcher at the University of Granada where he obtained the MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science. He has participated in several research projects related to data management. His research experience includes Intelligent Information Systems, Knowledge Representation, Semantic Web, Data Mining and Big Data. He has co-authored over 20 publications in international journals and conferences on these topics.

11:40
Lessons learnt from the four EiT demo sites in Faro, Bucarest, Levi and Helsinki
The presentation will summarize the actions performed at the Energy IN TIME demo sites, ranging from BMS modifications to metering improvements and energy auditing. Results and findings will be discussed, particularly with regards to the Finnish demo sites.

The Energy IN TIME project is divided into various modules, and the methodologies presented in the modules are applied to the demo sites. The presentation will give insight to how the project modules can be applied to actual buildings; one reference case being the fault diagnostics implemented to the variable air volume system in Sanomatalo, Helsinki.

About the speaker

Heikki RostilaHeikki Rostila is working in the field of sustainable building maintenance and operations, as Business Unit Director at Caverion Suomi Oy.  He holds a M.Sc. in energy economics, and is studying under the Doctoral Programme in Engineering at the Aalto University in Helsinki. He is involved in various projects related to the energy efficiency and life-cycle optimization of buildings, as well as technical asset management.

How-to-save-energy-and-costs

Workshop title: How to get energy and cost savings during buildings operation and maintenance?

 Anglet, France (30th June).

The European Project Energy in Time will be presenting at the Sustainable Places Conference, an innovative simulation-based control technique for improving energy efficiency in buildings

Energy in Time (EiT) project goes beyond existing building control techniques. The project is developing an integrated control & operation approach that will allow reducing system inefficiencies, contributing to improve building energy efficiency and comfort. Up to date, no other energy efficient tool or solution has been developed to be applied in nonresidential buildings. The use of the control methods proposed to operate existing building energy systems will result on 20% saving over previous energy consumption. To present this approach, the project has organized a workshop to be held during the Sustainable Places Conference in Anglet (France). It will take place next 30th June at Room 4 (9 – 12:30 a.m.), and registration to the conference is necessary following this link Energy in Time Workshop During the session, the speakers will address the question “how to save energy and costs during buildings operation and maintenance?” from viewpoints of different actors in the building sector. The project partners will report about the solutions investigated in EiT project and their application in four demo buildings including an airport, offices and test labs, a commercial and office building, and a hotel. This way the four demo sites will give credible evidence of the benefits of the application of this innovative approach for buildings operation and maintenance

How to save energy and costs advert

WORKSHOP CONTEXT

Up to 90% of the buildings’ life cycle carbon emissions occur during their operational phase, mainly as consequence of the HVAC, lighting and appliances’ energy use. This phase also represents 80% of building’s life-cycle cost of which 50% is consequence of the energy use. Therefore, energy and cost saving strategies addressing the building operation phase have a major impact in the building life cycle cost. During the session, the innovations of the European project Energy IN TIME (EiT) that contribute to reduce costs and energy consumption during building operation will be presented, assessing their future relevance and performance, considering the maturity and needs of the market.

Workshop Agenda – 30th June
 09.00 – Energy IN TIME (EiT) project presentation
 Belén Gómez-Uribarri (Acciona Infraestructuras)
 09.20 – EiT integrated solution for building control
 Jesús Campaña (Universidad de Granada)
 09.30 – Automatic operational plans generation
 Jesús Campaña (Universidad de Granada)
 09.50 – Building HVAC Fault Detection & Diagnostics
 Anarta Ghosh (United Technologies Research Centre Ireland – UTRCI)
 10.10 – Fault-adaptive control for VAV damper stuck in a multizone building
 Tejaswinee Darure (Université de Lorraine)
 10.30 – Coffee Break
 11.00 – Decision support method for building mid-long term analysis
 Benoît Vinot (Centre Scientifique et Technique du Batiment – CSTB)
 11.20 – Data mining for improving building operation
 Jesús Campaña (Universidad de Granada)
 11.40 – Lessons learnt from the four EiT demo sites in Faro, Bucarest, Levi and Helsinki
 Heikki Rostila (Caverion)
 12. 00 – Open discussion and questions
 12.30 – End of workshop

EXPECTED WORKSHOP OUTCOMES:

During the session, the speakers will address the question from viewpoints of different actors in the building sector, such as representatives from industrial companies, RTD performers, specialised SMEs in the field of consultancy, building maintenance, or technology providers.

They will report about the solutions investigated in EiT project and their application in four demo buildings with different typologies, uses and expected user behavior that have been selected to serve as testing places for the project by implementing innovative simulation-based control techniques aiming to reduce energy consumption and energy bill during their operation phase.

Different climatic zones are also addressed as the buildings are located in Bucharest (Romania), Faro (Portugal), Helsinki and Levi (Finland).

The session will show real ways forward from demonstrations and lessons learnt into replication of the experience in non-residential buildings in Europe, which present the building typologies that guaranties higher impact and room for improvement due to the variety and quantity of facilities and equipment covered and the operational management model used.

Design, energy management offices, investors and professionals form the building sector are targets of the session.

INNOVATIONS BEING ADDRESSED BY ENERGY IN TIME (EIT)

Energy IN TIME (EiT) project goes beyond existing building control techniques, developing an integrated control & operation approach, that combines state of the art modelling techniques with the development of an innovative simulation-based control technique with the overarching objective of automating the generation of optimal operational plans tailored to the actual building and users requirements. This approach will allow reducing system inefficiencies and contributing to improve building energy efficiency and comfort.

No other energy efficient tool or solution has been developed to date to be applied in non-residential buildings. The global novelty of the project relies on the integration of following partial innovations:

  • Predictive simulations techniques for the design and update of the operative plans.
  • Adaptive algorithms for the real-time control of the deviations in energy systems performance
  • Integration of the monitoring and metering systems of the building
  • Real-time adjustment of the execution of the operational plan
  • Automatic generation of optimal operation plans for the HVAC systems
  • Remote and automatic operation of the HVAC systems

The use of these control methods to operate existing building energy systems will result on 20% saving over previous energy consumption.

EiT project, started in October 2013 and funded by European Commission, is developing a Smart Energy Simulation-Based Control method to reduce the energy consumption and energy bill in the operational stage of existing non-residential buildings. The new techniques are based on the prediction of indoor comfort conditions and user behavior performance to improve the lifetime and efficiency of energy equipment and installations through continuous commissioning and predictive maintenance. A control tool will be implemented in the building energy management systems to be automatically and remotely operated. During the session, four demo sites will give credible evidence of the benefits of the application of this innovative approach for buildings operation and maintenance.

 

  • Registration fees

    Before
    07/06/16
    After
    07/06/16
    290 € TTC 410 € TTC
  • Social Program

    Additionnal ticket to the Gala dinner on June 29th 2016 30 € TTC
    Participation to the farewell drink on June 30th 2016 (included)  

Cancellation policy

Cancellation before May 16 2016: Full refund.
Cancellation before June 6 2016: 50% penalties.
Cancellation after June 6 2016: 100% penalties.
Cancellation requests must be sent to Insight Outside either by fax or by email.