Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Modern building automation systems collect and store vast amounts of data in temporal scales ranging from seconds to multiple years and spatial scales ranging from rooms to communities. But tools that facilitate management and visualization of these data are in their infancy. It has become abundantly clear that data availability alone has not significantly improved the way buildings are operated. Emphasis tends to be on presenting raw data, rather than providing new tools for improving building performance. The proposed research shall yield intuitive, informative, and educational visualization methods including Building Information Modeling (BIM) software, data acquisition and control, and advanced visualization. The research focuses on new mechanisms for integrating these different techniques, using simulation as the means for exploring different design options and improvement in building operations. We will define and develop new methods for the integration of real-time sensor data, occupancy information based on advanced wearable sensors and occupants' portable devices (and the buildings networks). These data will be combined with parametric information from the building to construct formal models that can be used for both simulation and control. The formal models will provide analytic results that will be then be used for a variety of simulations and later deployed in advanced 3D BIM visualization environments (at the building and campus levels). We will conduct real experimentation in the four test buildings at Carleton University. The results will be used by Autodesk Research in their BIM tools to allow Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) professionals to analyze real-time data and visualize the modeling results and the analysis results into their actual designs, improving the overall process.