A recommendation system for energy saving and user engagement in existing buildings

Abstract

Ranked as the major energy-consuming sector, the building industry continuously introduces enhanced energy-management systems towards more energy efficiency. Despite technological progress, high amounts of resources are still wasted worldwide due to the wrong usage of energy systems in existing building stock. As a response, this paper proposes a recommendation system that is based on information and communication technologies and that provides building users with hands-on executable recommendations to reduce their energy consumption. Indeed, because of their lack of energy awareness and knowledge, people may need guidance in their daily usage of a building to change their energy behaviour and to save energy. For that purpose, the recommendation system analyses building operation data in real time to identify energy wastes as well as suitable energy conservation measures that shall help in saving energy. One main challenge is to provide a highly scalable solution that can be easily applied in a wider range of buildings, thus enabling resource saving at a large scale or even worldwide. For that purpose, the system relies on a model-based expert system for easy adaptation in any building regardless of its type, size and usage.