Goals

The goals of the ReBuild Initiative are to:

• develop new methods and tools for building energy retrofit decisions using data-driven approaches
• facilitate the exchange of knowledge, data and software between academia, industry and government partners
• influence future policy and regulation in Canada regarding existing buildings.

Key questions

Researchers will address key questions in data-driven building energy retrofits such as:

• Which machine learning methods are effective in tackling each problem?
• How can these methods integrate with existing simulation-based approaches?
• What datasets are needed to power them, and how can they be evaluated?
• How should these developments be leveraged and deployed to deliver improved tools, analyses and policy measures?

Collaboration

It is important to find synergies between the methods used by professionals, service providers and policy-makers. Engineering consultants, architects and energy auditing companies must guide clients towards effective solutions and government agencies must enable beneficial choices through realistic policies to improve building stocks. This requires integration of methods used by companies to recommend solutions for specific buildings and the stocklevel methods used by policymakers to understand required interventions. Both processes are driven by data that is currently disconnected, often remaining siloed and unusable. This project will span this divide by providing a common analysis platform and by fostering collaboration through Working Groups and an annual Symposium.

Outcomes

The Initiative will:

• develop modelling approaches that span calibrated simulations, machine-learning based energy auditing, recommendation/targeting systems, stock modelling, generative design aids and interactive visual exploration
• develop software tools spanning individual building and portfolio analysis, life-cycle analysis and retrofit decision analysis
• inform the development of a code for existing buildings and other policies at municipal, provincial and federal levels
• train a cohort of skilled workers with expertise to apply cutting-edge methods to pressing problems in industry, government and academia. (Is this you? See vacancies!)