Clifford Federspiel, Research Specialist, Center for the Built Environment
Charlie Huizenga, Research Specialist, Center for the Built Environment
Rodney Martin, Graduate Student, Department of Mechanical Engineering
David Auslander, Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Qiang Zhang, Graduate Student, Department of Architecture

Sponsor: CBE

Building occupants are a mobile, intelligent, and ubiquitous source of information about how buildings are operating. They posses sensory modalities that cannot be matched even by the most expensive laboratory equipment. Furthermore, they can process this information in ways that exceed the capabilities of even the most sophisticated machines. However, the use of this information and reasoning ability for operating buildings is currently ad hoc. We are investigating ways to acquire information from occupants, provide information to occupants, and take actions based on occupant feedback so that the efficiency and effectiveness of building operations can be improved. This is an important problem: more than $2 billion annually could be avoided if more effective means of responding to the needs of occupants were utilized.

The goals of this project are twofold: to develop an occupant feedback user interface and to develop strategies for acting on occupant feedback in order to reduce operating cost and improve occupant satisfaction.

We plan to design a web-based user interface that will be compatible with existing computerized maintenance management software (CMMS) systems. A key feature of the user interface will be bi-directional flow of information to and from occupants. Our working hypothesis is that the design of the user interface can significantly reduce the cost of maintenance associated with complaints from occupants and simultaneously improve occupant satisfaction. We plan to test this hypothesis with a controlled field experiment.

We plan to develop diagnostic software that will help facility operators use feedback from occupants combined with information from digital control systems and an historical maintenance database to diagnose problems in buildings. We also plan to design optimized complaint-handling control actions. Data acquired from maintenance records at three different facilities show that standard complaint-handling actions may lead to an increase in future complaint frequency, rather than a decrease. We will use the complaint behavior model proposed by Federspiel (1998) to design optimized complaint-handling control actions, and compare them with standard practice using computer simulations.

Federspiel, C. C., 1998, "Predicting the Frequency of Hot and Cold Complaints in Buildings," Proceedings of 1998 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings, 8.69-8.84.