ADAPT4EE

Adapt for Energy Efficiency

(duration: 10/2011 - 10/2014 /// funding: CORDIS FP7 – ICT systems for energy efficiency)

Adapt4EE offers the next step in sustainable building. The project proposes innovative ways of incorporating business- and occupancy-related information in the architectural design process. This way, it becomes possible to design buildings that are not only constructed in an energy efficient way, but that will also save energy throughout their life-cycle.

Design, construction, maintenance

Energy efficiency criteria are usually only set in relation to the construction or maintenance of buildings. Energy consumption resulting from actual use of the structure is often left ignored. This is a waste, because most energy is consumed during the operation phase of a building. Altering aspects of the building to accomodate for real life use, results in high costs.

Modeling

The Adapt4EE project partners will develop new simulation and modeling tools, which allow designers and architects to use information about occupants (presence, movement, activities) early on in the design phase of architectural project.

Simulation tools that are currently available often allow for modeling of thermal processes, lighting, acoustics and fluid dynamics, but do not take into account the actual human occupants. Further, they are mainly meant for research purposes, and are therefor rarely used by actual designers, because of their steep learning curve.

Pilots

Input for simulations will be gathered from real life pilots. Researchers expect the biggest results can be achieved in dynamic, multi-purpose buildings such as hospitals or commercial structures. The university clinic of Navarra (Spain) and the Coimbra footbal stadium (Portugal) have therefor been selected as pilot sites.

Technology

Multi-type sensors will be used to evaluate user behaviour and occupancy. Based on these observation, future occupancy and business patterns will be predicted.

The challenge is to incorporate many diverse factors, from environmental factors (climate, (day)light) and maintenance, to business processes and occupant behaviour (psychological processes, personal preferences). Adapt4EE will combine different existing modeling languages and methods to develop a holistic multi-agent based simulation framework that can aggregate information from many different sources.

Links

Adapt4EE project website

Publications