LEAF: Live Building Performance Evaluation Framework

Abstract

Buildings contribute to approx. 32% of the world’s energy consumption, and as such, are one of the prime producers of CO2 emissions. Given documented discrepancies between the designed and operational behaviour of buildings, concepts such as continuous commissioning and performance testing have emerged. Performance testing utilises metadata schemas and generic libraries of tests to increase applicability and customizability of real-time performance monitoring. In this paper we present LEAF: a Live building performance EvAluation Framework. LEAF has been developed as a result of an extensive survey with building management professionals, who gave insight into the preferences for management of various buildings. We present LEAF’s microservice-style architecture, to increase reusability of its processes by other building intelligence applications, and use it to develop a performance monitoring application for a case study building. Furthermore, the live streaming processing of building operational data has posed significant challenges to the application of LEAF. We discuss these challenges and offer directions for their solutions.