Evaluation of school buildings energy consumption using Fuzzy Assistant operating uncertain knowledge

The Fuzzy Assistant based on fuzzy logic reasoning acts as a decision support system and helps to perform quickly and easily the estimations of the annual energy consumption and maximum electrical demand for the school buildings. The validation of Fuzzy Assistant has been done against the results of 60 building energy simulations by DOE-2 software. The six variable parameters in the Fuzzy Assistant are: length, width, fenestration, lighting power, infiltration of exterior air and occupancy density. For the existing buildings some observations, as for example the infiltration of exterior air, are difficult to measure and to determine. The confidence in the rules including these observations cannot be complete and consequently the certainty factors have been applied. The comparison of results obtained with and without the certainty factors presented in this paper shows a great utility of this approach in technical engineer practice