A Control System Approach to Corrective Maintenance Planning of Building Retrofitted Facilities

Traditional building retrofitting planning is a decision making process prior to the building retrofitting investment. Although the long term energy and financial issues of the retrofitting project are considered in some cases, the energy efficiency potentials due to the maintenance and operation of the retrofitted facilities are not sufficiently explored in existing studies. In the broad field of building facilities maintenance, a corrective maintenance planning for energy efficiency refers to the decisions over a sustainability period of a building retrofitting project concerning the replacements or repairs of the failed retrofitted facilities at scheduled maintenance intervals. This paper presents a control system approach to the Building Retrofitted Facilities Corrective Maintenance Planning (BRFCMP) problem. The totality of homogeneous population classes of the retrofitted facilities instead of individual items becomes the main issue of consideration, and a control system framework is proposed, based on which the optimization of BRFCMP is transformed to an optimal control problem. A Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach is then applied to solve the BRFCMP problem with and without consideration of uncertainties and disturbances. An actual building retrofitting project is used as the case study. Simulation results prove the feasibility and the effectiveness of the control system approach, revealing a further energy efficiency potential by optimizing the corrective maintenance of building retrofitted facilities.