This paper presents a building case study in China by applying a holistic approach which integrates

system dynamics and energy performance simulation to evaluate the building performance gap and
provide management strategies to minimize the performance gap. Several scenarios including six single
management strategy scenarios and four multiple management strategy scenarios are carried out and,
in each scenario, building performance is analyzed qualitatively in terms of project quality (ranging from
0 to 1), and quantitatively in terms of energy use intensity (kWh/m2). The results of this case study are
compared to another green office building located in the UK. The comparison of the two cases in China
and the UK, shows that design factors should be treated in a more stringent way instead of referring
values from local standard authorities only which could induce overdesign of the buildings. The
difference between actual and predicted building performance is normally named as building
performance gap or energy performance gap when only energy consumption is taken in consideration.

This paper presents a framework which is developed to fill this gap and a case study by applying the
framework. The framework is developed to evaluate the operational building performance gap by
connecting project management and building performance issues.

In parallel with field investigation and data collection, interviews of all relevant stakeholders are carried
out to analyze management related problems in the project, e.g. procurement process, organizational
learning, project objectives and vision, structure of the project team, knowledge background of all
stakeholders, communication and alignment with project team, operational issues. Then, system
dynamics (SD) modelling and simulation is used to explore the documented management problems and
their implications.1 A very powerful function of SD model is that it can be used to explore future
scenarios. For example, in a SD model different management decisions or choices could lead to different
building performance in a qualitative manner, which could be integrated with Design Builder to generate
building performance in kWh/m2.

The SD methodology includes three important steps: plotting Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD), generating
Stock Flow Diagrams (SFD) and developing the SD model, and model simulation and analysis. CLDs are
used to identify the relationships among the many related factors of a problem and SFDs are used for
simulation. SD is an appropriate methodology to help to analyze complex systems. So far, most studies
in this area focus on how to adjust energy policies in order to reduce energy consumption of building
sector or to reduce carbon emissions from building industry. In the future, more cases with different
building types and green rating levels will be investigated. The two real selected cases are both green
office buildings located in Shanghai, China and London, the UK separately. In both cases, after getting
the permission of building owners, integrated building information collection devices are installed to
measure the real building performance including operating temperature, relative humidity, CO2
concentration, PM2.5 concentration and lux level, and the energy consumption data is obtained from
the meter reading of the selected buildings. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2
provides the necessary literature background for the paper. Section 3 presents the framework in detail,
and section 4 the case in China. Section 5 presents the results of the framework application, and section
6 provides a discussion of results and comparison between two cases. Section 7 concludes the paper.

POE is a process and platform for systematic evaluation and studies of building performance during the
occupation stage of a building. POE is not only a process about technical data collecting but also a
feedback platform to get the response from real occupancies, and such feedbacks would be used for
other new projects with similar characteristics. According to the characteristic of data, building
performance gap is further classified as calculable and un-calculable categories (Table 1). In order to
deal with un-calculable elements, Sanni et al. [26] presented a holistic POE framework in 2016, in which
all responses were collected over a period of two months and then calculated into indicator’s mean
satisfaction index (MSI).

Causal factors consist of twelve different factors: project vision, modelling tools, facility management,
occupancy behavior, commissioning, communication and alignment, isolated knowledge island,
procurement process, stakeholder engagement, failure with energy technologies, appliances and
operational schedules. The framework developed in this paper is designed to address this gap, and
facilitate an analysis of why and how performance gap occurs in green buildings by considering not only
technical factors but social factors. Our proposed framework includes two main parts as shown: the
building performance simulation model (indicated in red) and SD project management model (indicated
in blue), color represents the connections between the two parts and the grey color represents the first
step of investigation. Data collection and field investigation are also required in POE analysis, but
interview of stakeholders is needed in this framework. This realistic building performance model needs
to be calibrated by comparing real energy consumption data in hourly, monthly and annually basis if
available. Designed values for all eight factors refer to the values in the design stage and is read by SD
model as initial values. The differences between designed values and measured values, named as the
relative deviation from design, is then used for validation test. In this paper, Total Hours Per Day is used
as an alternative value representing schedules, which is the summation of schedules in 24 h as shown in
Eq.

The SD model is developed based on established project management work that represents project
management through two key flows: one for project task flow and the other for project defect flow.
Based on this office building, eleven scenarios are developed including one reference scenario, six single
factor scenarios in which only one factor is changed, and four multiple factor scenarios in which multiple
factors are changed. In all the scenarios, only three factors in total are changed: initial alignment, defect
checking rate and the timing of actor interaction. For reference scenario, the initial alignment is set to be
0.5 which could range from 0 to 1; the defect checking rate is shown in and it is normal design process
meaning that design team, construction team and operational team started to join the project in
chronological order without overlap.

The results include three parts: single factor effect, multiple factor effect and comparison between
China and the UK. In each part, there are two kinds of results: one is project quality for all scenarios
which is the output from SD simulation, and the other is energy consumption intensity for the same set
of scenarios correspondingly which is the output from energy simulation.

The effects of all single factors on both project quality and energy performance are shown in Fig. 7 & Fig.
8 respectively. In Fig. 7, the y axis “project quality” here represents the performance of the targeted
building which ranged from 0 to 1. The higher the project quality, the better the performance of the
targeted building. Monthly energy consumption data for all scenarios is shown in Fig. 8, where the y axis
represents overall energy consumption intensity with unit of kWh/m2 and the x axis the time with unite
of month. There is no use of air- conditioning system in transitional season in principle and only proved
special request would be accepted to turn on air-conditioning system for requested levels. It is shown
that the project quality keeps on decreasing in the design and build stages of the project timeline for all
scenarios.
Monthly energy consumption intensity for all multiple factor scenarios is shown in Fig. 10, where the y
axis represents overall energy consumption intensity with unit of kWh/m2 and x axis the time with unit
of month.

For case in the UK, with color of lines becoming lighter, the energy consumption intensity becomes
smaller meaning of better building performance. However, it is not the same for the case in China and
some reverse is found in transition seasons. Overall, the highest improvement is found to be very
significant with about 4 and 2 kWh/m2 for cases of China and the UK separately, compared with its own
Calibrated Model. So far, this framework has been applied to two real green office buildings located in
China and the UK separately, and it is demonstrated to have the potential to be applied for green office
buildings world widely without limitations on climate zone, procurement process, and green building
standard. It is clearly shown that the rankings of all scenarios in terms of improvements achieved for
both quantitative and qualitative results are different. The ranking for quantitative results from best to
worst is: Ideal, Good, Good Checking, Good Alignment, Slightly Good, Ideal Integrated Design,
Reasonable Integrated Design, No Alignment, Calibrated Model, No Checking and Worst.

The maximum EUI in the case of UK is found to be lower than that in the case of China, though the
building quality of UK case is lower. The reason is that in the design stage, the project team has more
stringent design parameters for the case of UK, but client use the value from standard for unclear
parameters in the case of China. For example, the occupancy density, lighting density, equipment
density and occupancy schedule are all the values from local standard.