CAEE Department to Host Seminar on Building Energy Modeling by Dr. Amir Roth, Technology Manager, Building Technology Office, U.S. Department of Energy

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Illinois Institute of Technology, John T. Rettaliata Engineering Center, Room 104, 10 West 32nd Street, Chicago, IL 60616
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Dr. Amir Roth, Technology Manager for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building Technology Office (BTO), will be presenting a seminar, "Bridging the Building Energy Modeling-Control Engineering Divide," on Friday, September 28, 2018, at 2:00 pm, in the John T. Rettaliata Engineering Center (RE) Room 104. Dr. Roth is Technology Manager for the Building Energy Modeling (BEM) sub-program, where he has served since 2010. Prior to that, he was first an assistant and then an associate professor of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. He has a B.S. in physics from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He is a member of ASHRAE and IBPSA. Dr. Roth will be in Chicago for the 2018 Building Performance Analysis Conference and SimBuild – Co-organized by ASHRAE and IBPSA-USA – and will give an overview of DOE supported work to bridge building energy models and building controls. The event is hosted by the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering (CAEE) at Illinois Tech. There is no RSVP; all are welcome to attend.

Abstract

Building Energy Modeling (BEM) is an established discipline with a range of use-cases and tools that support them. Building controls engineering is an even more established discipline. These two fields, while intuitively aligned, are nearly perfect strangers in practice. BEM tools model idealized controls. Control engineers interpret control design intent from high-level specifications or simply fall back to tried-and-true sequences. The result is added work and significant missed opportunity for energy savings.

The Department of Energy's Building Technologies Office (BTO) has active programs in both BEM and building controls. In the past several years, these programs have collaborated on a set of projects designed to bridge the BEM-controls divide. The flagship is Spawn, a next-generation BEM engine that leverages the equation-based simulation language Modelica to model realistic control sequences that can then be directly and automatically implemented in control hardware. Spawn is complemented by OpenBuildingControl which implements high-performance control sequences in Modelica and provides technical assistance to control vendors developing translation and testing tools for Modelica-based control. BOPTEST is a simulation-based testbed for control sequences written in any language. It targets energy-efficiency assessments in specific buildings as well as prototype buildings for national scale impact analysis. In the background lurks VOLTTRON, BTO's open-source communication and control platform that targets small buildings that don't have automation systems. This talk will discuss BTO's activities in this emerging area.

Speaker Bio

Amir Roth is the Technology Manager for BTO’s Building Energy Modeling (BEM) sub-program and has served in that role since 2010. Prior to that, he was first an assistant and then an associate professor of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. He has a B.S. in physics from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He is a member of ASHRAE and IBPSA.

Earn Engineering Themes Credit in Energy for attending. To earn credit, take a selfie at the event and email 2-3 sentences on what you learned from the seminar along with you HawkID number.