IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/rensus/v147y2021ics1364032121005116.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An overview of data tools for representing and managing building information and performance data

Author

Listed:
  • Luo, Na
  • Pritoni, Marco
  • Hong, Tianzhen

Abstract

Building information modeling (BIM) has been widely adopted for representing and exchanging building data across disciplines during building design and construction. However, BIM's use in the building operation phase is limited. With the increasing deployment of low-cost sensors and meters, as well as affordable digital storage and computing technologies, growing volumes of data have been collected from buildings, their energy services systems, and occupants. Such data are crucial to help decision makers understand what, how, and when energy is consumed in buildings—a critical step to improving building performance for energy efficiency, demand flexibility, and resilience. However, practical analyses and use of the collected data are very limited due to various reasons, including poor data quality, ad-hoc representation of data, and lack of data science skills. To unlock value from building data, there is a strong need for a toolchain to curate and represent building information and performance data in common standardized terminologies and schemas, to enable interoperability between tools and applications. This study selected and reviewed 24 data tools based on common use cases of data across the building life cycle, from design to construction, commissioning, operation, and retrofits. The selected data tools are grouped into three categories: (1) data dictionary or terminology, (2) data ontology and schemas, and (3) data platforms. The data are grouped into ten typologies covering most types of data collected in buildings. This study resulted in five main findings: (1) most data representation tools can represent their intended data typologies well, such as Green Button for smart meter data and Brick schema for metadata of sensors in buildings and HVAC systems, but none of the tools cover all ten types of data; (2) there is a need for data schemas to represent the basis of design data and metadata of occupant data; (3) standard terminologies such as those defined in BEDES are only adopted in a few data tools; (4) integrating data across various stages in the building life cycle remains a challenge; and (5) most data tools were developed and maintained by different parties for different purposes, their flexibility and interoperability can be improved to support broader use cases. Finally, recommendations for future research on building data tools are provided for the data and buildings community based on the FAIR principles to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

Suggested Citation

  • Luo, Na & Pritoni, Marco & Hong, Tianzhen, 2021. "An overview of data tools for representing and managing building information and performance data," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 147(C).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:rensus:v:147:y:2021:i:c:s1364032121005116
    DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2021.111224
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032121005116
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.rser.2021.111224?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Zhao, Hai-xiang & Magoulès, Frédéric, 2012. "A review on the prediction of building energy consumption," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 16(6), pages 3586-3592.
    2. Balaji, Bharathan & Bhattacharya, Arka & Fierro, Gabriel & Gao, Jingkun & Gluck, Joshua & Hong, Dezhi & Johansen, Aslak & Koh, Jason & Ploennigs, Joern & Agarwal, Yuvraj & Bergés, Mario & Culler, Davi, 2018. "Brick : Metadata schema for portable smart building applications," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 226(C), pages 1273-1292.
    3. Mathew, Paul A. & Dunn, Laurel N. & Sohn, Michael D. & Mercado, Andrea & Custudio, Claudine & Walter, Travis, 2015. "Big-data for building energy performance: Lessons from assembling a very large national database of building energy use," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 85-93.
    4. Molina-Solana, Miguel & Ros, María & Ruiz, M. Dolores & Gómez-Romero, Juan & Martin-Bautista, M.J., 2017. "Data science for building energy management: A review," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 598-609.
    5. Marco Pritoni & Drew Paine & Gabriel Fierro & Cory Mosiman & Michael Poplawski & Avijit Saha & Joel Bender & Jessica Granderson, 2021. "Metadata Schemas and Ontologies for Building Energy Applications: A Critical Review and Use Case Analysis," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(7), pages 1-37, April.
    6. Naser Hossein Motlagh & Mahsa Mohammadrezaei & Julian Hunt & Behnam Zakeri, 2020. "Internet of Things (IoT) and the Energy Sector," Energies, MDPI, vol. 13(2), pages 1-27, January.
    7. Kheiri, Farshad, 2018. "A review on optimization methods applied in energy-efficient building geometry and envelope design," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 897-920.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hernández, José L. & de Miguel, Ignacio & Vélez, Fredy & Vasallo, Ali, 2024. "Challenges and opportunities in European smart buildings energy management: A critical review," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 199(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zhang, Liang & Wen, Jin & Li, Yanfei & Chen, Jianli & Ye, Yunyang & Fu, Yangyang & Livingood, William, 2021. "A review of machine learning in building load prediction," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 285(C).
    2. Chen, Zhelun & O’Neill, Zheng & Wen, Jin & Pradhan, Ojas & Yang, Tao & Lu, Xing & Lin, Guanjing & Miyata, Shohei & Lee, Seungjae & Shen, Chou & Chiosa, Roberto & Piscitelli, Marco Savino & Capozzoli, , 2023. "A review of data-driven fault detection and diagnostics for building HVAC systems," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 339(C).
    3. Amasyali, Kadir & El-Gohary, Nora M., 2018. "A review of data-driven building energy consumption prediction studies," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 81(P1), pages 1192-1205.
    4. Filippos Lygerakis & Nikos Kampelis & Dionysia Kolokotsa, 2022. "Knowledge Graphs’ Ontologies and Applications for Energy Efficiency in Buildings: A Review," Energies, MDPI, vol. 15(20), pages 1-32, October.
    5. Jha, Sunil Kr. & Bilalovic, Jasmin & Jha, Anju & Patel, Nilesh & Zhang, Han, 2017. "Renewable energy: Present research and future scope of Artificial Intelligence," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 297-317.
    6. Berardi, Umberto, 2017. "A cross-country comparison of the building energy consumptions and their trends," Resources, Conservation & Recycling, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 230-241.
    7. Grillone, Benedetto & Danov, Stoyan & Sumper, Andreas & Cipriano, Jordi & Mor, Gerard, 2020. "A review of deterministic and data-driven methods to quantify energy efficiency savings and to predict retrofitting scenarios in buildings," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 131(C).
    8. Li, Xinyi & Yao, Runming, 2020. "A machine-learning-based approach to predict residential annual space heating and cooling loads considering occupant behaviour," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 212(C).
    9. Walter, Travis & Sohn, Michael D., 2016. "A regression-based approach to estimating retrofit savings using the Building Performance Database," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 179(C), pages 996-1005.
    10. Hong, Tianzhen & Piette, Mary Ann & Chen, Yixing & Lee, Sang Hoon & Taylor-Lange, Sarah C. & Zhang, Rongpeng & Sun, Kaiyu & Price, Phillip, 2015. "Commercial Building Energy Saver: An energy retrofit analysis toolkit," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 159(C), pages 298-309.
    11. Cai, Wei & Wen, Xiaodong & Li, Chaoen & Shao, Jingjing & Xu, Jianguo, 2023. "Predicting the energy consumption in buildings using the optimized support vector regression model," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 273(C).
    12. Sulzer, Matthias & Wetter, Michael & Mutschler, Robin & Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Alberto, 2023. "Platform-based design for energy systems," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 352(C).
    13. Robinson, Caleb & Dilkina, Bistra & Hubbs, Jeffrey & Zhang, Wenwen & Guhathakurta, Subhrajit & Brown, Marilyn A. & Pendyala, Ram M., 2017. "Machine learning approaches for estimating commercial building energy consumption," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 208(C), pages 889-904.
    14. Fan, Cheng & Xiao, Fu & Zhao, Yang & Wang, Jiayuan, 2018. "Analytical investigation of autoencoder-based methods for unsupervised anomaly detection in building energy data," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 211(C), pages 1123-1135.
    15. Ru-Guan Wang & Wen-Jen Ho & Kuei-Chun Chiang & Yung-Chieh Hung & Jen-Kuo Tai & Jia-Cheng Tan & Mei-Ling Chuang & Chi-Yun Ke & Yi-Fan Chien & An-Ping Jeng & Chien-Cheng Chou, 2023. "Analyzing Long-Term and High Instantaneous Power Consumption of Buildings from Smart Meter Big Data with Deep Learning and Knowledge Graph Techniques," Energies, MDPI, vol. 16(19), pages 1-24, September.
    16. Soutullo, S. & Giancola, E. & Heras, M.R., 2018. "Dynamic energy assessment to analyze different refurbishment strategies of existing dwellings placed in Madrid," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 152(C), pages 1011-1023.
    17. Yimin Chen & Guanjing Lin & Eliot Crowe & Jessica Granderson, 2021. "Development of a Unified Taxonomy for HVAC System Faults," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(17), pages 1-25, September.
    18. Shaoxiong Li & Le Liu & Changhai Peng, 2020. "A Review of Performance-Oriented Architectural Design and Optimization in the Context of Sustainability: Dividends and Challenges," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(4), pages 1-36, February.
    19. Lyu, Wenjing & Liu, Jin, 2021. "Artificial Intelligence and emerging digital technologies in the energy sector," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 303(C).
    20. Zhiyu Pan & Guanchen Pan & Antonello Monti, 2022. "Semantic-Similarity-Based Schema Matching for Management of Building Energy Data," Energies, MDPI, vol. 15(23), pages 1-23, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:rensus:v:147:y:2021:i:c:s1364032121005116. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600126/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.