State-Based Modeling of Buildings and Facilities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formalized state-based modeling methodology for buildings and facilities, enabling better analysis and monitoring of energy efficiency and system behavior.

Contribution

It extends DIN EN ISO 16484's use of state machines to create a comprehensive modeling approach for building management systems.

Findings

Facilitates formalized description of building data and behavior.

Enables sophisticated analysis during building monitoring.

Supports integration with intelligent control systems.

Abstract

Research on energy efficiency of today's buildings focuses on the monitoring of a building's behavior while in operation. But without a formalized description of the data measured, including their correlations and in particular the expected measurements, the full potential of the collected data can not necessarily be exploited. Who knows if a measured value is good or bad? This problem becomes more virulent as smart control systems sometimes exhibit intelligent, but unexpected behavior (e.g. starting heating at unconventional times). Therefore we defined a methodology starting already at the design of the building leading to a formalized specification of the implementation of a building's management system, which seamlessly integrates to an intelligent monitoring. DIN EN ISO 16484 proposes a method to describe functional requirements in an easy to understand way. We extended its use of state machines to our proposed concept of state based modeling. This proved to be a wholesome approach to easily model buildings and facilities according to the DIN EN ISO 16484 while providing the possibility to apply sophisticated and meaningful analysis methods during monitoring.