Diagnosis in buildings: New trends illustrated by an application

Similar to other engineering systems, buildings are also complex systems. The whole building system is highly vulnerable to different kinds of faults, failures and human misbehavior that could affect the building performance. The available fault diagnosis tools and methodologies particularly rely on rule or pure model-based approaches. It is assumed that the model could be applied to any situation without taking into account actual contexts. Setting a complete model with all contextual representations is a challenging job. On the other hand, unreliable instrumentation and non-formalization of the expert's knowledge are also challenging ones. The objective of this paper is to highlight the challenges that lie in this problem domain, as well as to provide a strategy about how to solve them.A real case study has been investigated to exemplify the new trends in buildings: a classroom in the University of Southern Denmark.