Understanding the Impact of the Operational Faults on Building Energy Performance

Buildings consume a significant share of total global energy consumption, which poses risks to the sustainability of the built environment. Despite the uptrend of the energy-efficient strategies and technologies implemented in the building sector, an energy gap exists between expected and actual operation. Thus, improving maintenance strategies is one of the critical variables in reducing buildings' energy consumption gap and in turn increasing the occupants' satisfaction rate. To assist decision-makers and occupants to improve building maintenance, modelling and simulation of the whole building operational systems faults provide a thorough understanding of the risks and impacts of failures. Furthermore, it serves as a baseline input for training fault detection and diagnosis models. Most fault detection and diagnosis techniques in the building sector work with the HVAC system and its components' faults. However, there is an obvious lack of developing whole building models that predict overall impacts of different systems and subsystems faults over the entire building energy performance cycle. This paper presents preliminary endeavours on detecting simulated building systems faults, including abrupt, gradual and simultaneous faults using the SARIMAX method. Furthermore, the study proceeds to quantify the impact of the detected faults on whole building energy performance in hot climate areas using Energyplus software. The findings demonstrate that faults significantly impact building energy performance, with HVAC faults serving as the most impactful source.