Research article

Early warning signals of failures in building management systems

¹ Brunel University London, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, UK
² National Physical Laboratory, Hampton Road, Teddington, UK
³ City Science, The Generator, Kings Wharf, The Quay, Exeter, UK

^* Corresponding author: joaquinmesajimenez@gmail.com

Received: 29 December 2020
Accepted: 22 April 2021

Abstract

In the context of sensor data generated by Building Management Systems (BMS), early warning signals are still an unexplored topic. The early detection of anomalies can help preventing malfunctions of key parts of a heating, cooling and air conditioning (HVAC) system that may lead to a range of BMS problems, from important energy waste to fatal errors in the worst case. We analyse early warning signals in BMS sensor data for early failure detection. In this paper, the studied failure is a malfunction of one specific Air Handling Unit (AHU) control system that causes temperature spikes of up to 30 degrees Celsius due to overreaction of the heating and cooling valves in response to an anomalous temperature change caused by the pre-heat coil in winter period in a specific area of a manufacturing facility. For such purpose, variance, lag-1 autocorrelation function (ACF1), power spectrum (PS) and variational autoencoder (VAE) techniques are applied to both univariate and multivariate scenarios. The univariate scenario considers the application of these techniques to the control variable only (the one that displays the failure), whereas the multivariate analysis considers the variables affecting the control variable for the same purpose. Results show that anomalies can be detected up to 32 hours prior to failure, which gives sufficient time to BMS engineers to prevent a failure and therefore, an proactive approach to BMS failures is adopted instead of a reactive one.