TOPAs

Tools for Continuous Building Performance Auditing

Project Summary

TOPAs will develop an open, cloud-based platform of analytic tools to minimise the gap between the predicted and the actual energy usage in blocks of buildings. TOPAs is targeting to reduce the existing gap to 10% and approach additional energy savings in the pilot regions up to 20%.

Main Objectives of Project

TOPAs main focus is reducing the gap from an operational perspective, hence supporting Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE).

TOPAs adopts the principle of continuous performance auditing and considers not only energy use but also an understanding of how buildings are used and their climatic state (environmental & air quality), thus providing a holistic performance audit process through supporting tools and methodologies that minimise the gap between predicted and actual energy use.

Nimbus Role

Collaborators

CIT are leading the Scientific & Technical Management for the TOPAs project. From a research perspective, CIT will lead WP4 “Distributed Energy Management” focusing on the development of energy management approaches at building and district level. This involves the development of a novel approach to distributed model predictive control to provide a scalable solution for bridging the gap between predicted and actual energy usage.

In addition, CIT will extend and develop tools and services to support continuous performance monitoring including services to support and validate occupancy modelling, wireless sensor infrastructure design for monitoring and visualisation tools for sustained energy savings. Finally, the CIT campus will be leveraged for the demonstration and validation of the TOPAs solution.