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Title: Scalable tuning of building models to hourly data

Journal Article · · Energy (Oxford)
 [1];  [2]
  1. Jacksonville State Univ., Jacksonville, AL (United States)
  2. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

Energy models of existing buildings are unreliable unless calibrated so they correlate well with actual energy usage. Manual tuning requires a skilled professional, is prohibitively expensive for small projects, imperfect, non-repeatable, non-transferable, and not scalable to the dozens of sensor channels that smart meters, smart appliances, and cheap/ubiquitous sensors are beginning to make available today. A scalable, automated methodology is needed to quickly and intelligently calibrate building energy models to all available data, increase the usefulness of those models, and facilitate speed-and-scale penetration of simulation-based capabilities into the marketplace for actualized energy savings. The "Autotune'' project is a novel, model-agnostic methodology which leverages supercomputing, large simulation ensembles, and big data mining with multiple machine learning algorithms to allow automatic calibration of simulations that match measured experimental data in a way that is deployable on commodity hardware. This paper shares several methodologies employed to reduce the combinatorial complexity to a computationally tractable search problem for hundreds of input parameters. Furthermore, accuracy metrics are provided which quantify model error to measured data for either monthly or hourly electrical usage from a highly-instrumented, emulated-occupancy research home.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC); USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Energy Efficiency Office. Building Technologies Office
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725; CEBT105; BT0201000; DEAC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1185507
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1247854
Journal Information:
Energy (Oxford), Vol. 84; ISSN 0360-5442
Publisher:
ElsevierCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 10 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (1)

Building simulation: Ten challenges journal April 2018