Progress on Enabling an Interactive Conversation Between Commercial Building Occupants and Their Building to Improve Comfort and Energy Efficiency.

摘要

With the proper knowledge, motivation, and control, building occupants can actively reduce their energy use and increase individual comfort. Traditionally, occupant interactions with building systems consist of adjusting thermostats, blinds, and clothing. Energy interfaces provide a new level of motivational information. Many studies have reported energy savings after dashboards for operators are installed, but these provide little actionable information to the occupant and the occupant cannot report individual comfort. The Building Agent (BA), in development at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), provides an interface for the occupant to converse with the building control system and the building engineer. BA aims to create cohesion between building automation system (BAS) data, local measurements, and occupant feedback to provide visualizations, empowering occupants and building engineers to take diagnostic, proactive, energy-saving, and comfort-improving actions. The multilayer BA architecture consists of central server, measurement, and distributed application layers. The server layer aggregates global and localized measurements with occupant feedback to correlate perceived comfort with actual data throughout the building. The measurement layer complements BAS data with localized, environmental condition measurements at workstations. The application layer provides a bidirectional communications mechanism between the building and the occupants that accepts comfort feedback and provides energy performance information. The interface layer also uses three displays to influence building energy use: empathetic and personalized gauges, graphical data, and competitive rankings. This paper presents the architecture and preliminary outcomes of the BA-enabled feedback loop developed by NREL and tested in its Research Support Facility (RSF).