Characterizing the Benefits and Limitations of Smart Building Meeting Room Scheduling

Automated building meeting assignment attempts to save meeting room energy by more intelligently assigning meetings to the available rooms. While this approach has shown good potential for particular conditions, it relies on time-consuming building simulations or model based algorithms that do not scale well to larger problems, and fails to account for important building energy factors. We present a new approach to applying and understanding meeting scheduling based on building power characterization. We determine the key factors affecting the building energy consumption with respect to the meeting assignment, and develop an energy savings model. Using this model, we show how meeting room, meeting schedule, and weather related parameters affect the energy savings potential of smart meeting scheduling. We further identify the situations where smart meeting room assignment algorithms would give significant energy savings, and where simple assignment algorithms would suffice. We also demonstrate that the incorporation of key modeling parameters greatly improves modeling accuracy over prior approaches.