Collaborative analysis for energy usage monitoring and management on a large university campus

Abstract

This describes a successful ongoing collaboration between the Department of Statistics and the Facilities Operations at the University of Connecticut (UConn). The collaboration stemmed from facilities reaching out to the productive Statistical Consulting Services (SCS) in the Department of Statistics for help in understanding and optimizing energy usage across the large university campus. Starting on a small scale with one faculty leader and two graduate assistants in 2016, the continued high level of deliverables resulted in the project growing in personnel and scope to involve four statistics faculty collaborators, four engineers and operations staff from the facilities unit, one staff from Office of Budget and Planning, one postdoc, ten PhD graduate assistants, four MS graduate students, five UConn undergraduate students, and two international visiting undergraduate researchers. This paper highlights this journey and explains how the concerted effort and team work continues to pave the way for useful implementation, many‐tiered mentoring, interesting research projects, and team satisfaction of a job well done.