Discovering unexpected information using a building energy visualization tool

Building energy consumption is an important problem in construction field, old buildings are gap of energy and they need to be refactored. Energy footprint of buildings needs to be reduced. New buildings are designed to be suitable with energy efficiency paradigm. To improve energy efficiency, Building Management Systems (BMS) are used: BMS are IT (Information Technology) systems composed by a rules engine and a database connected to sensors. Unfortunately, BMS are only monitoring systems: they cannot predict and mine efficiently building information. RIDER project has emerged from this observation. This project is conducted by several French companies and universities, IBM at Montpellier, France, leads the project. The main goal of this project is to create a smart and scalable BMS. This new kind of BMS will be able to dig into data and predict events. This IT system is based on component paradigm and the core can be extended with external components. Some of them are developed during the project: data mining, building generation model and visualization. All of these components will provide new features to improve rules used by the core. In this paper, we will focus on the visualization component. This visualization use a volume rendering method based on sensors data interpolation and a correlation method to create new views. We will present the visualization method used and which rules can be provided by this component.

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