The Beauty of Algorithms for your Building's Energy Efficiency | EnergyLink
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The Beauty of Algorithms for your Building’s Energy Efficiency

Our proven process improves a building’s efficiency by having on-site energy and improves the building’s usage through an algorithm. The algorithms we use make sure all HVAC units aren’t turned on at the same time or that all of the heaters aren’t running to counter-balance the HVAC units.

Simple changes in how a building operates leads to huge energy savings for the customer.

An elevator’s algorithm, described below, which is similar to our algorithm due to the fact that it also saves a building money, uses less energy, and creates a surplus cash flow. The earliest and simplest reasonable approach to elevator dispatching is still surprisingly common. Known as “collective control,” or simply “the elevator algorithm,” it consists of two rules:

  • As long as there’s someone inside or ahead of the elevator who wants to go in the current direction, keep heading in that direction
  • Once the elevator has exhausted the requests in its current direction, switch directions if there’s a request in the other direction. Otherwise, stop and wait for a call

This process is pretty simple and straightforward. This is why your typical elevator bay has call buttons for going up and down–so the car that’s already heading skyward can stop to collect anybody who’s going up.

The policy doesn’t account for most of the factors above we mentioned earlier, but it’s not a bad place to start. The elevator algorithm is easy to follow, fairly energy-efficient, and everyone gets an elevator within one round trip.

Algorithms Saving You Money

It’s no secret that an algorithm can be the difference between saving you a ton of money and losing money to careless, unnecessary expenses.

Dr. Panos Parpas, of Imperial College London, says that wherever we use computers, we rely on algorithms: “There are lots of types, but algorithms, explained simply, follow a series of instructions to solve a problem.”

The example he gave was using a recipe to bake a cake; “Instead of having generic flour or a generic oven temperature, the algorithm will try a range of variations to produce the best cake possible from the options and permutations available.”

Algorithms have been used for decades and currently are utilized by analyzing massive amounts of data that is generated before getting processing and understanding it. They are good because they free up our time, do mundane processes on our behalf while saving us money.

 

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