The paper describes the design of a Building Controls Virtual Test Bed (BCVTB), a simulation environment for the development of control algorithms and strategies for the major energy systems in buildings, HVAC, lighting, active facades and on-site generation. The BCVTB is based on the whole building energy simulation program EnergyPlus and includes both the pure simulation and the hardware-in-t...

Given the dominating impact of the built environment on global carbon emissions, reducing operational energy use in buildings has long been considered a key strategy towards more sustainable urban development. In contrast, building energy use related to material production, construction, and demolition has been considered to be significantly less important. However, given the proliferation of l...

There has been extensive research focusing on developing smart environments by integrating data mining techniques into environments that are equipped with sensors and actuators. The ultimate goal is to reduce the energy consumption in buildings while maintaining a maximum comfort level for occupants. However, there are few studies successfully demonstrating energy savings from occupancy behavio...

Daylight plays a significant role in sustainable building design. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the impact of manual solar shades on indoor visual comfort. A developed stochastic model for manual solar shades was modeled in Building Controls Virtual Test Bed, which was coupled with EnergyPlus for co-simulation. Movable solar shades were compared with two unshaded windows. Results...

Commercial buildings incorporate Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) to monitor indoor environment conditions as well as controlling Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. Measurements of temperature, humidity and energy consumption are typically stored within BEMS. These measurements include underlying information regarding building thermal response, which is crucial fo...

In France, buildings account for a large part of the energy consumption and carbon emissions. Both are mainly due to Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems. So, the present work deals with the predictive control of multizone HVAC systems in nonresidential buildings. We used the PMV (Predicted Mean Vote) index as a thermal comfort indicator and developed low-order ANN-based mod...

Today, many building software tools for evaluating energy efficiency are available. More than three hundred are listed by the US Department of Energy. Despite the diversity of the tools and their users, they generally share the same goals: to reduce the consumption of energy and even to produce surplus energy. We were interested in comparing the information provided by five softwares programmes...

The energy performance of radiant slab cooling relative to conventional air systems to be clarified for climates from cold and dry to very hot and humid. EnergyPlus simulations were used to compare the energy performance of 1) radiant slab cooling combined with a dedicated outdoor air system and 2) a variable air volume system. Simulation results show that the radiant slab system provided 10% t...