Research on Brick Schema Representation for Building Operation with Variable Refrigerant Flow Systems

TL;DR

This paper extends the Brick Schema to include Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) systems, enabling better semantic description and data analysis for energy-efficient building management, demonstrated through a case study in China.

Contribution

It introduces a VRF module for Brick Schema, addressing a gap in building metadata standards for VRF systems, and develops a framework for scalable building operation and energy analysis.

Findings

Successfully extended Brick Schema with VRF module

Verified the VRF module through application in a Chinese building

Provided a scalable framework for VRF data analysis and management

Abstract

Building metadata is regarded as the signpost in organizing massive building data. The application of building metadata simplifies the creation of digital representations and provides portable data analytics. Typical metadata standards such as Brick and Haystack are used to describe the data of the building system. Brick uses standard ontologies to create building metadata. However, neither Haystack nor Brick has provided definitions about the Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) system so far. For years, both Brick and Haystack working groups have been discussing how to describe VRF in their schema, mainly about the classification of VRF and the definitions of VRF units. There were no settled solutions for these problems. Meanwhile, the global VRF market is growing increasingly fast because of the energy efficiency and installation simplicity of the VRF system. It is needed to have the metadata to describe VRF units in buildings for data analysis and management. Addressing this challenge, this paper extended Brick Schema with the VRF module and verified the Brick VRF module. Then, the model and the service framework were developed and applied for a building in China. The framework can serve portable energy analysis for different areas. The VRF module of this paper provides a possible solution for the expression of the VRF system in the building semantic web. The works in this paper will support semantic web in automation strategies for building management and scalable building operation.