Energy Efficiency Analysis Incorporating Uncertainties in Buildings

First step in designing smart homes is energy efficiency analysis including energy optimization and consumption analysis. This paper incorporates the uncertainty of the effective parameters and probabilistically optimizes the energy consumption in a building. To this end, probability density functions (PDFs) of building uncertain parameters are modeled by point estimate method and the energy usage in buildings is optimized. EnergyPlus and MATLAB software are respectively used to compute the energy consumption in a building and to optimize the energy consumption. Energy consumption of the building and the thermal comfort are considered as objective functions of the proposed multi-objective optimization problem. The 12-story commercial building is used as a case study. To assess the proposed method, the proposed probabilistic method is compared with the deterministic method. The results show a significant difference between the deterministic and probabilistic cases. The maximum difference between the mean optimal values of variable parameters in these cases is about 28%. Finally, sensitivity of the results to the climate changes is also investigated in this paper.