Towards Automated Energy Flexibility Deployment in Buildings: A Solution at the ZEB Laboratory

This paper explores the utilization of a living lab as a practical testing ground for deploying building energy flexibility (BEF) and proposes a methodology for the implementation of a service architecture solution to facilitate deploying BEF in a zero-emission office building, the ZEB Laboratory in Trondheim, Norway. This work discusses the challenges of current building management system (BMS) solutions in deploying BEF. Selected digital solutions developed in the ZEB Lab are elaborated on. The presented service architecture solution is system-agnostic and provides the possibility to implement other systems/components into the framework continuously. The presented setup is very flexible regarding the way data is received and has proven to work well for data retrieval, data preparation, visualization and the application of control scenarios. Insights gained from the implementation of the service architecture solution are presented and challenges for future work are outlined.