An LCM Framework to Couple Spatially Distributed Energy Simulation and Occupancy Models for Optimizing Building Energy Consumption

摘要

The building construction sector continues to be a major consumer of energy in the United States. Energy consumption in a building typically spans across various life-cycle phases such as the material production and constriction phase, use and maintenance phase, and the end-of-life phase, with the use and maintenance phase constituting around 80% of total energy requirements. Since people spend most of their time indoors, the energy use behavior of building occupants is a critical factor that affects the total energy consumption. In this paper, an agent based model which simulates the effects of this dynamic occupant behavior is coupled with an energy use simulation model through a distributed computing environment based on the principles defined in the lightweight communications and marshalling (LCM), a common tool employed in robotics. The framework addresses two main objectives: (1) achieve multimodal synchronization and data exchange of distinct and spatially distributed simulation models and (2) visualize the effect of dynamic occupant behavior on the life cycle energy consumption in a building. This framework will achieve data synchronization and transfer of information between different software modules, which run simultaneously in a distributed fashion thereby testing the effects of various occupancy related energy interventions on life-cycle energy consumption.