Modeling on Indoor Transportation Energy Use for Large-Scale Commercial Buildings

In recent years, people pay more and more attention to large-scale commercial buildings because of the high intensity of their energy use. For these commercial buildings, the indoor transportation system is a significant energy consumption component. This chapter mainly focuses on the electricity consumption of elevators in office buildings. To summarize characteristics of running schedules and quantity, statistical methods are utilized according to the hourly energy data series from the monitoring system. The energy use of elevators nearly keeps constant during working days. To explain the steady energy use, on-site investigations and tests are implemented. A mechanical elevator model is provided to explain the nonlinear relation. In addition, a variable-element Poisson flow is modeled, aiming at obtaining visitor flow rate of elevators. At last, an hourly energy use model for elevators is degraded from the detailed mechanical model by time integral process from per minute to per hour. The hourly elevator energy model that is much simpler compared with the mechanical model not only eliminates those partial dynamic factors but also emphasizes the main hourly factors, which is very useful for both energy assessment and brief diagnosis in the total building level.