Developing a Dashboard for High Occupancy Buildings

Abstract

Energy management tools have become essential for high occupancy buildings because they allow building managers to understand their building’s energy efficiency and identify areas of environmental waste. However, a published and customizable energy management tool standardized for all high occupancy buildings currently does not exist, requiring individual companies to spend time and money creating one that more accurately models their building’s energy efficiency. In this project, we developed the prototype Dean Dashboard, a customizable energy management tool that analyzes a building’s energy usage and optimizes the cost to meet a goal of obtaining the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Operation and Maintenance (O&M) certification. This project uses an M.C. Dean operated-and-maintained facility as the case model. M.C. Dean is a design-build company for mission-critical facilities. The Dean Dashboard is comprised of five key features: exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) forecasting models, EWMA control charts, energy efficiency metric calculations, a LEED score optimization model, and a system improvement analysis. Through the integration of these features, the dashboard provides detailed insights into a building’s energy consumption and provides recommendations for how the building can improve its energy efficiency.