Investors and occupiers want comfortable buildings with reliable performance. At the same time, they want to save energy and manage running costs.
These demands lead to increasingly complex building systems, and because of this complexity projects often fail to deliver the predicted performance. Buildings consume more energy than anticipated, cause higher cost, and often have problems in providing good indoor environment quality.
A key reason for this performance gap is the lack of quality management throughout the building process, from the original contract specification, through design and construction to continuous operation.
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QUANTUM is a four year-long EU funded project which started in January 2016. By developing and demonstrating pragmatic tools and services, QUANTUM aims to help close the quality and performance gap between building systems design requirements and real installations.
The QUANTUM project is delivered by 14 partners from 12 countries within the EU. BRE is a technical partner and representative partner for the UK. The coordinator of the project is IGS, Technische Universitaet Braunschweig.
This project is developing three innovative Information and Communications Technology (ICT) driven tools, to enable effective quality management of all relevant services within the building life cycle. These tools are:
HPS/NG9
Cost-effective and easy to install in-situ energy metering devices with online data analysis (by Energy Team, Italy).
Performance Test Bench
The first tool for the specification and automated validation of Building Management System functions using Active Functional Specifications (by SYNAVISION, Germany).
Comfortmeter
The first completely web-based questionnaire for perceived user comfort (by Factor4, Belgium).
Analysis of Buildings Across Europe
Over 120 buildings across Europe have been analysed to provide the empirical data to inform Quantum’s findings
This analysis was carried out over two phases. Phase 1 involved a small-scale tools demonstration in a working environment for three buildings covering Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. Phase 2 covered a further four countries, including the UK, and focused on the testing of previously defined quality management processes and tools for building performance.
The knowledge gained during Phase 2 is being exchanged and discussed among partners and finally transformed into best-practices recommendations. This output will be used as a base material for the development of business plans for quality management implementation and further improvement of tools and services.
