Adverse condition and critical event prediction in commercial buildings: Danish case study

Over the last two decades, there has been a growing realization that the actual energy performances of many buildings fail to meet the original intent of building design. Faults in systems and equipment, incorrectly configured control systems and inappropriate operating procedures increase the energy consumption about 20% and therefore compromise the building energy performance. To improve the energy performance of buildings and to prevent occupant discomfort, adverse condition and critical event prediction plays an important role. The Adverse Condition and Critical Event Prediction Toolbox (ACCEPT) is a generic framework to compare and contrast methods that enable prediction of an adverse event, with low false alarm and missed detection rates. In this paper, ACCEPT is used for fault detection and prediction in a real building at the University of Southern Denmark. To make fault detection and prediction possible, machine learning methods such as Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) are used. A new PCA–based method is developed for artificial fault generation. While the proposed method finds applications in different areas, it has been used primarily for analysis purposes in this work. The results are evaluated, discussed and compared with results from Canonical Variate Analysis (CVA) with KDE. The results show that ACCEPT is more powerful than CVA with KDE which is known to be one of the best multivariate data-driven techniques in particular, under dynamically changing operational conditions.