Smart Zero-energy Buildings and Communities for Smart Grids

5Indoor Environmental Quality and Energy Consumption Assessment and ANN Predictions for an Integrated Internet-based Energy Management System Towards a Zero-energy Building

5.1. Introduction

Universities’ campuses and campus buildings can be viewed as small districts and microgrids. Therefore, the School of Design and Environment (SDE) at the National University of Singapore intends to integrate all buildings under a common energy and indoor environmental quality management platform. Moreover, all SDE buildings are currently under refurbishment while a new building (SDE 4) is under construction.

The overall procedure requires the collection of data on the energy consumption as well as on the indoor environmental quality. The monitoring activities for all the NUS SDE buildings, with emphasis on the SDE 3 building, are included in section 5.3. The energy consumption and indoor environmental quality are evaluated and cross correlated. Prediction algorithms are tested using artificial neural networks. The specifications for the integrated internet-based installation for SDE is included in section 5.7, while the conclusions and future research can be found in section 5.8.

5.2. Description of the SDE buildings

5.2.1. General information

The building under study (SDE 3) is one of the three buildings of the School of Design and Environment of the National University of Singapore. The building’s location is pinpointed in Figure 5.1, and the other SDE buildings (SDE 1 and SDE 2), ...