Global Sensitivity Analysis applied to Total Energy Use in Buildings

The work presented in this paper has been carried out in the frame of the IEA-ECBCS Annex 53 project: “Total Energy Use in Buildings: Analysis and evaluation methods”. The aim of this work is to present a methodology to identify the most influential parameters affecting the final energy consumption in office buildings.
In order to represent buildings and HVAC systems, a representative typology was defined, modeled and simulated and subsequently a global sensitivity analysis (variance-based method) was performed.
This paper provides useful information to future works related to design building decisions, building calibration, energy management strategy, etc. helping to detect and rank those factors which need to be better measured and/or estimated, in order to improve building energy efficiency.