Developing Building Energy Saving and Control Systems: A System Dynamics Approach

Building is the largest energy end-use worldwide, and hence energy saving and control in this regard has been the focus of attention for most countries over the recent several decades. Although a series of relevant standards are formulated in China, the actual building energy consumption always exceeds the design threshold. Revealed the previous studies regrading building energy saving, they focused mostly on some one-sided level, such as a technical or managerial level. Most of them, however, failed to discuss how to reduce building energy consumption in a systematic view, leading to poor intervention tactics of building energy saving to some extent. Therefore, this paper aims to facilitate the intervention in building energy conservation from a system perspective. Firstly, an integrated framework was used to deduce the connotation of a building energy saving and control system, determined by stakeholders, building energy consumption, and energy saving strategies. Secondly, system influencing factors were identified through literature retrieval. System Dynamics was then used to establish interactive subsystems on different levels, including macro governmental management subsystem, mesoscopic management subsystem, and micro energy use subsystem, respectively. This paper helps further predict the most efficient strategies on building energy conservation. Findings could be prior bases to research the system characteristics and evolution mechanism of building energy saving and control system in the future. Besides, it could better provide theoretical guidance for the dynamic precision intervention in building energy conservation on a systematic level.