Description

One of Anago’s clients is a consultancy for energy saving and sustainable energy applications. It consults housing corporations, energy companies and governing authorities about investments with regard to energy saving, sustainable energy and issues surrounding climate change.

The Environment Analysis Model forms the basis for consultancy. Essentially the model calculates the consequences of energy usage, carbon dioxide emission and the costs of investing in destruction, renovation and new-building programmes. Calculations are made at the lower level of the individual buildings and the results are then aggregated to the higher level of groups of buildings. In order to do this effectively different groups of buildings are distinguished and categorised on the basis of age and type of construction.  Based on this detailed information and a large database with parameters (regarding climate, investment costs, technologies and material) a programme calculation can be made for the coming decades.

State of Art

The first model has been created in a spreadsheet application. In order to provide more detailed information to the clients it is necessary to enlarge the detail level of the calculations.  Hence a large number of categories will have to be added covering variables such as the level of isolation and heating, cooling, and hot water systems. However, covering these types of details in a spreadsheet appears to be impossible.

The use of the spreadsheet technology has led to the following bottlenecks:

• The complexity of the computational problem is too high to be covered by a spreadsheet.
• Basic scenario data cannot be reused because of its size and therefore has to be collected over and over again.
• Results of different scenarios cannot be easily compared with each other. 
• The spreadsheet only allows one user at the time.

Migration

The customer has investigated the possibilities of replacement. This investigation showed that replacement with a standard system was practically impossible. The only option left was to replace the original system with a customised system. However, this turned out not to be a reasonable choice either, due to the many disadvantages of such a solution: The complexity of the system resulted in a long and risky trajectory, the construction appeared costly and the system concerned did not provide the required flexibility. Hence, the following environment appeared to be the best alternative, which made the disadvantages of a customized system disappear: assemble by using Anago.

Anago solution

The required functionalities of the new model were discussed during two workshops. The functional design that was created following the prior investigation was used as a basis for this discussion. The calculations were already partly included in this design, but the most important part (calculating a specific scenario with programmes over a certain period of time) has only been broadly addressed. During the workshops this part was further discussed in depth.

The system supports the following functions:

• Input of global, geographical and scenario-parameters
• Distribution of square meters of buildings among categories
• Connection with different systems in order to collect fuel data
• Integrity check of inputdata
• Reports of energy usage, carbon dioxide emission, isolation- and application costs
• Analysis between different scenarios

As opposed to programmed customised systems the Anago solution naturally provides a number of required functionalities:  exporting to Excel and pdf; data importation; turning and tilting of tables; logging of changes in the data; back-up; authorisation and connections with different systems.

Profit

The Anago application facilitates the calculation at a higher more detailed level, which gives the client the opportunity to provide a new type of service and strengthen its position with regard to the competition.  Furthermore, using the Anago application is a lot more efficient in various ways:

• Manual input has been limited thanks to the efficient use of previously imported data.
• The process is less error-prone thanks to an internal integrity-check that detects conflicting and lacking data.
• Scenarios can easily be created, analysed and compared with each other.

Because the users are also trained in using Anago Assemble, they are able to facilitate future expansions themselves.

 

Would you like to know more about this specific client case or about the implementation of customised application using Anago Assemble? Contact Thomas de Nooij telephonically under the following number: +31 (0)30 657 2613, or through e-mail: tdnooij@anago.nl.