Bayesian Theorem-based Prediction of Success in Building Commissioning

In recent years, building commissioning has often been part of a standard delivery practice in construction, particularly in the high-performance green building market, to ensure the building is designed and constructed per owner's requirements. Commissioning, therefore, intends to provide quality assurance that buildings perform as intended by the design and often helps achieve energy savings. Commissioning, however, is not as widely adopted as its potential benefits are perceived. Owners are still skeptical of the cost-effectiveness claims by energy management and commissioning professionals. One of the issues in the current commissioning practice is that not every project is guaranteed to benefit from the commissioning services. This, coupled with its added cost, the commissioning service is not acquired with great acceptance and confidence by building owners. To overcome this issue, this paper presents a unique methodology to enhance owner's predicting capability of the degree of success of commissioning service using the Bayesian theorem. The paper analyzes a situation where a future building owner wants to use a pre-commissioning in an attempt to refine the success rate of the future commissioned building performance. The author proposes the Bayesian theorem based framework to improve the current commissioning practice where building owners are not given accurate information how much successful their projects are going to be in terms of energy savings from the commissioning service. What should be provided to the building owners who consider their buildings to be commissioned is that they need some indicators how likely their projects benefit from the commissioning process. Based on this, the owners can make better informed decisions whether or not they acquire a commissioning service.