Development of an Energy-Aware Intelligent Facility Management System for Campus Facilities

According to the U.S. Green Building Council, buildings consumed 36% of total energy consumption in United States. With the concept of sustainability continues to grow in importance, more researches have been focused on improving energy efficiency during a building's operation phase. Academic settings, such as university facilities, pose a unique set of challenges to facility managers and administrators in achieving energy efficiency. Unlike commercial, residential or industrial buildings, campus facilities are composed of different building types with different requirements for indoor air quality, humidity, temperature and ventilation from continuously changing occupants. The current practice with campus facility management requires facility managers to manually schedule tasks, often based on the order of incoming requests without considering their impact on building energy consumption. This paper aims to develop an energy-aware intelligent facility management system for campus facilities. It first builds a knowledge database which includes two main parts: basic information on common daily work request and work instructions; and also the impact on building energy performance. An artificial intelligent model is then proposed to automatically analyze and prioritize future work requests based on factors such as safety, energy consumption impact, occupant satisfaction, etc. A case study is conducted on campus to validate the system with focus on HVAC tasks. The goal is to help facility managers improve building energy efficiency while meeting other restraints.