Assessment of Building Intelligence Requirements for Real Time Performance Testing in Smart Buildings

Buildings contribute with 32% to the world’s overall energy consumption. Given documented discrepancies between the design and operation of buildings, concepts such as continuous commissioning and performance testing (PTing) have emerged. To increase the applicability and customizability of real-time performance monitoring, PTing frameworks utilize metadata schemas and generic libraries of tests. However, real-time PTing requires enhanced instrumentation in the building, such as meters and sensors. Considering the usage and age of buildings, different buildings impose more stringent requirements for sensing equipment in terms of applicability of PTing. Prior work establishes a framework for automatic discovery of performance tests, and their continuous execution without human intervention. In this paper, we provide an algorithm for automatic estimation of the Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI), a metric for measuring the technological readiness of a building proposed by the European Commission. In line with our PTing framework, we estimate a minimal SRI for PTing to be 23%, implying high applicability across a variety of buildings. We evaluate a case study building for its SRI and perform sensitivity analyses of the SRI specific requirements against the PT-SRI.