Benchmarking Approaches for Assessing the Performance of Building Control Strategies: A Review

In the last few decades, researchers have shown that advanced building controllers can reduce energy consumption without negatively impacting occupants’ wellbeing and help to manage building systems, which are becoming increasingly complex. Nevertheless, the lack of benefit awareness and demonstrati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEnergies (Basel) Vol. 15; no. 4; p. 1270
Main Authors Ceccolini, Clara, Sangi, Roozbeh
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.02.2022
Subjects
Algorithms
Behavior
Benchmarks
Best practice
Building control
building controls
building simulation
Buildings
Climate change
control benchmarking
control test bench
Controllers
Cost control
Efficiency
Energy consumption
Hardware-in-the-loop simulation
Heterogeneity
HVAC
HVAC control
Simulation
Standardized tests
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Summary:In the last few decades, researchers have shown that advanced building controllers can reduce energy consumption without negatively impacting occupants’ wellbeing and help to manage building systems, which are becoming increasingly complex. Nevertheless, the lack of benefit awareness and demonstration projects undermines stakeholders’ trust, justifying the reluctance to approve new controls in the industry. Therefore, it is necessary to support the development of controls through solid arguments testifying to the performance gain that can be achieved. However, the absence of standardized and systematic testing methods limits the generalization of results and the ability to make fair cross-study comparisons. This study presents an overview of the different benchmarking approaches used to assess control performance. Our goal is to highlight trends, limitations, and controversies through analytics to support the definition of best practices, which remains a widely discussed topic in this research area. We aim to focus on simulation-based benchmarking, which is regarded as a promising solution to overcome the time and cost requirements related to field or hardware-in-the-loop testing. We identify and investigate four key steps relating to virtual benchmarking: defining the key performance indicators, specifying the reference control, characterizing the test scenarios, and post-processing the results. This work confirmed the expected heterogeneity, underlined recurrent features with the help of analytics, and recognized limits and open challenges.
ISSN:1996-1073
1996-1073
DOI:10.3390/en15041270