A Participatory Approach for Developing Decision Support Systems for Building Energy Plants

Abstract

Building energy plants generate, consume and transfer a large amount of energy to deliver various services, such as heating, cooling, lighting and electricity. In large buildings, these energy plants can be complex to manage optimally. Decision support systems are useful tools for aiding managers, however, they too can also become overly complex. Participatory approaches for decision support system development and application are suggested in literature for overcoming this issue. This paper presents the foundations of a wider research project that is applying participatory techniques in the development of a decision support system at a hospital energy plant. A generic integrated building energy plant optimisation model is formulated and expressed using problem domain language with the aim of promoting participation from stakeholders, such as facility managers or maintenance personnel, that do not necessarily have modelling expertise. While the formulation is targeted towards modelling the plant’s operational behaviour and decisions, the paper describes how it can be used in a decision support system for aiding short-, medium and long-term decisions of facility managers – highlighting again the model’s flexibility to meet stakeholder requirements elicited using participatory techniques. The project’s case study site, Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital in Queensland, Australia, is introduced along with the planned methodology for participatory development of the decision support system. Finally, future directions are proposed for both further research and practical applications of the contributions.