Buildings are the world’s largest CO2-producers. The rise of technical building systems and sophisticated building automation systems opens new possibilities to improve building performance, to reduce emissions and enhance indoor environmental qualities.
At the same time, the increasing complexity of these systems overstrains engineers, contractors and facilities managers. These factors result in significant performance gaps between intended operation and real operation, estimated to be as much as 25% in additional energy consumption. Due to this severe lack of quality, society is wasting a tremendous potential to fight climate change and improve the space in which we spend 95% of our lives, the indoor environment. This deviation is not a technological deficit – something we do not have the means for, but a lack of quality. Hence, improvements in quality management are urgently needed.
The objective of the QUANTUM project is therefore to develop and demonstrate pragmatic services and appropriate tools supporting quality management in the design, construction, commissioning and operation phase as a means to close this gap in European buildings. The project integrates different innovative ICT-driven tools supporting the quality management process into building and energy services:
• The Performance Test Bench by synavision/ Germany can be used to specify and test functions of building services;
• HPS/NG9 by Energy Team SpA/Italy can be used to cost-effectively meter a variety of physical parameters in buildings;
• The Comfortmeter by Factor4/Belgium is a web tool to evaluate the perceived indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in office buildings (www.comfortmeter.eu)
Within QUANTUM, partners have developed the tools close to market readiness and have applied them on a representative set of buildings. The demonstrators included different building types in several European countries. Furthermore, the tools have been applied within different services like engineering, performance contracting or re-commissioning.
