Pavel Dybskiy, Russell Richman

AN INTERACTIVE WORKBENCH FOR MONITORING, IDENTIFICATION AND CALIBRATION OF BUILDING ENERGY MODELS



Abstract:
This paper presents a concept and main capabilities of the Matlab-based Building Energy Modeling (BEM) Workbench developed at Ryerson University (Toronto, Canada). The workbench was designed as an interactive tool intended to facilitate and to provide common media for data processing tasks related to various building energy modeling procedures such as (i) on-site data monitoring, (ii) preparation of input data and analysis of simulation results, (iii) validation, verification and calibration of building energy models and (iv) estimation of building thermal parameters.
To illustrate the use of the BEM-Workbench several working scenarios are presented. Known inputs from literature methodologies of building thermal parameter estimation were implemented into the workbench to demonstrate one of its purposes as a hypothesis testing tool. Another scenario was introduced to show how the workbench can be used to analyze a buildings model’s dynamic behavior, a critical step in the model’s calibration procedure.
Programmatically, the workbench is configured as a set of Matlab GUI components and functions with capability to further expand its functionality.