Building Services

The building sector is responsible for around 40% of total energy consumption in European countries, offering vast scope for savings. People spend about 90% of their lives in buildings and their behavior can significantly influence this energy consumption. The combination of expertise surrounding buildings, with a focus on energy, comfort and health aspects of the indoor and outdoor environment, is unique. Traditional building process control lack real time input from occupant preferences and ‘human-in-the-loop’ strategies can help manage individualized comfort needs in the most efficient way. Research is carried out in the dedicated laboratory as well as in real life situations and predicting human thermal responses and understanding human thermoregulation reactions in different office building environmental conditions are essential.

The group identifies two main research directions:

• The concept of ‘Individual’ comfort system whereby each occupant has control over local climate. This localized control has to be integrated in overall control at room or building level. Focus point will be on school ventilation, as in 75% of the schools the indoor conditions are far from optimal.
• Development of a Distributed Building Energy Management System. The multi-level approach adopted by the group provides good cooperation opportunities with smart power grids and local sustainable power sources. Special focus is the energy flexibility of buildings.

Key research topics include:

• Building Energy Management Systems 
• Thermal comfort and optimal personalized control
• Commissioning and Big Data analysis

There is cooperation with Electrical Energy Systems from the Department of Electrical Engineering of TU/e and the Centre for Mathematics and Informatics (CWI) Amsterdam  in the domain of Intelligent Buildings and Smart Grid.