A Comprehensive Evaluation Method for Air-Conditioning System Plants Based on Building Performance Simulation and Experiment Information

During the design stage of an HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system in a construction project, designers must decide on the most workable design scheme for the plant room in the building based on the evaluation of multiple aspects related to system performance that need to be considered, such as energy efficiency, economic effectiveness, etc. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a comprehensive evaluation method for the plant rooms of centralized air-conditioning systems in commercial buildings. This new method consists of two analyses used in tandem: Building Performance Simulation (BPS) models and a collection of real HVAC design cases (the carried-out design solutions). The BPS models and a knowledge of the reduction approach based on Rough Set (RS) theory are used to generate data and weight factors for the indices of energy efficiency; and the real design cases are employed with a heuristic algorithm to extract the compiled empirical information for other evaluation items of the centralized HVAC system. In addition, this paper also demonstrates an application in an actual case of a building construction project. By comparing the expert decision-making process and the evaluation results, it is found that they are basically consistent, which verifies the reasonability of the comprehensive evaluation method.