What we do: As part of the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics at Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture, the building data analytics team works with state-of-the-art technologies to design intelligent dashboards. Located in the Intelligent Workplace, a research office, we test and demonstrate many of own prototypes on our own faculty and graduate students. We work closely with our sustainability conscious partners to provide them with actionable information through data graphics and intuitive building controls. Our work ranges from the development of building data analytics apps and widgets to data analysis to interface design, with the goal of empowering building owners, operators and building users to save energy.

Big data analytics has been of growing interest to the building industry, especially with the introduction of disclosure/energy benchmarking laws and the need for medium and large building owners and operators to reduce their portfolio’s energy consumption. To date, most disclosure laws only mandate monthly energy and resource consumption data entered at the end of the year. Data accuracy is often unreliable and verification of the submitted data is tedious and costly. Currently, there are no robust and fully integrated data acquisition, monitoring and analysis platforms that are being used in the building and construction industry. Middleware technologies for building industry data acquisition are in nascent stages and have very limited capability. Often, they are not robust enough to support the various communication protocols, multiple data types and sources, and shear data volume. Our projects demonstrate an integrated real-time data collection, monitoring and analytics approach to perform rigorous and meaningful building energy and indoor environmental quality performance analysis.

Who we work with: Our partners include PNC Bank, the Department of Defense, and Consortium for Building Energy Innovation (CBEI). We have identified four types of stakeholders that play a role in energy use of the built environment: executives (ID-C), facility manages (ID-F), occupants (ID-O) and the public (ID-P).

People: We are a group of faculty, researchers and graduate students from Carnegie Mellon University who are passionate about developing building energy apps, visualizing and analyzing data to influence stakeholders to improve the quality and efficiency of the built environment. Our group is comprised of architects, engineers, data specialists, and software developers who design interactive and informative interfaces. Feel free to contact us!