RESEARCH ARTICLE Uncertainty and Sensitivity Decomposition of Building Energy Models

As building energy modeling becomes more sophisticated, the amount of user input and the number of parame-ters used to define the models continue to grow. There are numerous sources of uncertainty in these parameters, especially when the modeling process is being performed prior to construction and commissioning. Past efforts to perform sensitivity and uncertainty analysis have focused on tens of parameters, while in this work, we increase the size of analysis by two orders of magnitude (by studying the influence of about 1000 parameters). We extend traditional sensitivity analysis in order to decompose the pathway as uncertainty flows through the dynamics, which identifies which internal or intermediate processes transmit the most uncertainty to the final output. We present these results as a method that is applicable to many different modeling tools, and demonstrate its applicability on an example EnergyPlus model.