Effectiveness of Automatic and Manual Calibration of an Office Building Energy Model

Cristina Cornaro,Marco Lauria,Livio De Santoli,Valerio Adoo Puggioni,Francesco Bosco

doi:10.3390/app9101985

Cristina Cornaro, Marco Lauria + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/app9101985

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Abstract

Energy reduction can benefit from the improvement of energy efficiency in buildings. For this purpose, simulation models can be used both as diagnostic and prognostic tools, reproducing the behaviour of the real building as accurately as possible. High modelling accuracy can be achieved only through calibration. Two approaches can be adopted—manual or automatic. Manual calibration consists of an iterative trial and error procedure that requires high skill and expertise of the modeler. Automatic calibration relies on mathematical and statistical methods that mostly use optimization algorithms to minimize the difference between measured and simulated data. This paper aims to compare a manual calibration procedure with an automatic calibration method developed by the authors, coupling dynamic simulation, sensitivity analysis and automatic optimization using IDA ICE, Matlab and GenOpt respectively. Differences, advantages and disadvantages are evidenced applying both methods to a dynamic simulation model of a real office building in Rome, Italy. Although both methods require high expertise from operators and showed good results in terms of accuracy, automatic calibration presents better performance and consistently helps with speeding up the procedure.

Highlights

The construction sector has a primary role in CO2 reduction in Europe since buildings use around 40% of total energy consumption and generate almost 36% of greenhouse gases [1]
This paper introduces an automatic calibration procedure developed by the authors that couples dynamic simulation and sensitivity analysis with automatic optimization using IDA ICE, Matlab and GenOpt respectively
The selected input parameters were involved in the second optimization problem for the calibration

Summary

Introduction

The construction sector has a primary role in CO2 reduction in Europe since buildings use around 40% of total energy consumption and generate almost 36% of greenhouse gases [1]. Recent data on world energy consumption in both residential and commercial buildings are presented by Allouhi et al, 2015 [2], together with an overview of measures and policies adopted by different countries for the reduction of energy consumption in buildings. They showed how in Asia, rapidly developing economies, essentially India and China, are looking to reduce the dramatic increase of energy consumption in buildings due to the fast urbanization rate [3].

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