2017 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Control Science and Systems Engineering
Whole Building System Fault Detection Based on
Weather Pattern Matching and PCA Method
Yimin Chen
Engineering Drexel University
Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental
Philadelphia, PA, USA
Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture
School of Electrical Engineering and Information
Beijing, China
email: yc596@drexel.edu
Abstract—Multivariate statistical process analysis (MSPA)
methods have been widely employed for component level fault
detection in buildings. An MSPA method named as weather
pattern matching (PM) and principal component analysis
(PCA) method is proposed for whole building system fault
detection. This method is modified from a component level
fault detection method which is proved effective in detecting
faults in air handling unit (AHU) and variable air volume
(VAV) terminal. In the proposed method, Symbolic Aggregate
approXimation (SAX) method is employed to find similar
weather pattern in historical database to accurately generate
dynamic baseline dataset for PCA model to detect system
faults. One real building data is used to evaluate the
effectiveness of the proposed method.
Keywords-fault detection; weather pattern matching;
principal component analysis; symbolic aggregate
approXimation
I. INTRODUCTION
Buildings are responsible for more than 40% of the
energy consumption in the U.S. Malfunctioning control,
operation and building equipment are considered as the top
cause for “deficient” building systems. Fault detection and
diagnosis (FDD) can bring 10-40% energy saving for the
heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) system [1].
Fault detection methods for building equipment and system
are categorized into two parts: model-based approach and
data driven based approach [2], [3]
A system level fault refers to a fault occurs in one
equipment but causes interaction in different sub-systems.
Although, component level fault detection method can
report a single equipment operation abnormality, it may fail
to detect faults which are caused by coupling impacts from
different equipment or subsystems in real practice. In recent
years, the development of system level methods for whole
building fault detection and diagnosis have drawn a strong
attention [4], [5]. Different from component level fault
detection, whole building fault detection usually employs a
top-down fault detection strategy [6] which treats a building
as one whole system to detect faults which cause system-
level impacts. For whole building system, model-based
approach was employed to treat building energy
consumption as a benchmark to analyze system operation
performance. For example, EnergyPlus simulation reference
model is used to calculate the annual energy consumption to
VOLTTRON Compatible Whole Building Root-Fault Detection and
Diagnosis, DOE, (DE-FOA-0001167)
978-1-5386-0484-7/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Jin Wen
Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental
Engineering
Drexel University
Philadelphia, PA, USA
email: jw325@drexel.edu
determine if the system has operation faults [7]. Automated
Building Commissioning Analysis Tool is developed to
employ a simulation combing expert system to detect the
energy abnormality [8]. However, it is usually time-
consuming to develop a detailed building energy and
operation model. At the same time, calibrating and
maintaining such models in real operation are challenging
and impractical.
Due to the progress of data collecting and processing
techniques, massive amounts of data generated from
building systems can be gathered and stored in building
automation system (BAS) or building energy management
system (BEMS), such that the state of building operating
processes can easily be observed. Therefore, data driven
based fault methods such as MSPA have been widely
adopted to monitor equipment operation in buildings in the
past few years including AHU faults [9], VAV terminals
faults [10] and chiller faults [11].
However, few studies have been found to fulfill the task
of whole building system fault detection. There are two
main challenges in whole building system fault detection.
The first challenge is that monitoring a building system with
various operation modes makes it difficult to develop and
maintain various system models. The second challenge is
that there are different sub-systems coupled together in
building system with tremendous data measurements which
will not only cause a very high computation burden, but also
have impact on the detection accuracy and trigger false
alarm.
In this paper, a weather PM and PCA method which is
based on the modification of a pattern matching and PCA
method for AHU and VAV terminal fault detection
proposed by Li et al., [12] is developed. Weather PM is
firstly implemented based on the SAX method to mine the
weather pattern data. A baseline database is generated after
similar weather pattern is identified and clustered. PCA is
used to detect the system fault. One real building data
obtained from Drexel University is used to test the results of
the proposed method.
II. WEATHER PATTERN MATCHING AND PCA DETECTION
METHOD
A. SAX Based Weathere PM
For heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC)
system in buildings, the impacts from weather condition,

occupants and different electrical appliances play a critical
role in HVAC system operation. Usually, the schedule of
occupants and the usage of electrical appliances follows
relatively fixed schedule and are seldom monitored in
current practice. Therefore, finding and matching similar
weather pattern to generate baseline data are main task in
this study.
In the research, SAX is used to search similar weather
pattern in historical database. SAX is a Piecewise Aggregate
Approximation based method to find similarity of time
series data [13]. In SAX method, time series data is divided
into equal width data segments. These segments are
represented by different symbolic strings. Through this
process, the time series data dimension is reduced and
similar data pattern can be easily marked as a discrete low
dimension data for later clustering to find similar pattern.
Finding similarity in a lower dimension data is more
efficient. The test data and candidate historical fault free
data can be combined to one L length time series X(t). X(t) is
then normalized and divided into according to normalized
mean breakpoint. Different symbolic letters are assigned to
the X(t) according to the normalized data and clustering tool
such as VizTree [14] can be used to cluster the decomposed
data.
Outdoor air enthalpy is used as a benchmark to find the
similar pattern in historical database because outdoor air
enthalpy includes the information of outdoor dry bulb
temperature and relative humidity. Therefore, similar
outdoor air enthalpy data provide similar system operation
information which can be used to generate baseline data. Fig.
1 shows a tagging result on enthalpy data for one day by
using SAX method.
Figure 1. One day outdoor enthalpy tagging result with 30-minute window
size.
B. PCA Fault Detection
PCA is one of the most popular MSPA methods
employed in process control industry to monitor system
operation. PCA uses orthogonal transformation procedure to
extract a set of linearly uncorrelated principal components
(PCs) from the possibly correlated original variables [13]. In
PCA, a data measurements matrix ∈ ×
includes
samples and process variables. X can be decomposed into
a principal matrix plus a residual matrix E. The principal

matrix is a product of a scores matrix T (I × A) and a
loadings matrix P, as given in equation 1.
(1)
= + = + = +
where is a score vector (orthogonal) which contains
information about relationship between samples and is a
loading vector (orthonormal) which contains information
about relationship between variables. is the number of
PCs which explain the variability of a process.
Hotelling statistics (T2) and Squared Prediction Error
(SPE) [15] statistics control charts are commonly used with
PCA techniques to judge whether the operation is under
abnormality or not. When a fault occurs in a operation
process, such fault usually causes one or several changes in
monitored variables, resulting in some PCs with larger
variation which are beneficial for monitoring the fault
(informative PCs), and other PCs with less or without
variation. The T2 statistic is a measure of the variation in the
PCA model and the SPE statistic is a measure of the amount
of variation not captured by the PCA model. In the study, T2
statistic is used to obtain the detection result and can be
calculated for each new observation by:
(2)
= ∑
where ∑ contains the non-negative eigenvalues
corresponding to the a principal components.
The upper confidence threshold of T2 can be calculated
by using F-distribution:
=
( ) (3)
, ,
where n is the number of samples in the data, α is the level
of significance.
C. Method Description
Firstly, on-line fault free data is collected and cleaned to
generate a historical fault-free dataset. Data from test day
and historical fault-free dataset are combined together to
generate one time series data and then normalized. This time
series data is divided into equal sized data segment named
as test window. In the research, each data window includes
30-minute operation data samples. Therefore, each test day
is divided into 48 fixed test windows. Although, moving
window method is widely adopted in monitoring equipment
operation and provide a higher detection accuracy, it has
very high computation burden especially when data
measurements are very large. Besides, the dynamic response
of building system does not change too much in most of the
operation time. Therefore, a fixed data window is adopted to
generate baseline data. Different window sizes can be used
according to the local weather information, building type
and system dynamic in the real practice to reflect more
accurate system operation. In order to expend data samples
to building PCA model for fault detection, a data searching
pool with 180-minute data adjacent to the operation time of
the test data window is defined. Historical data windows in
data searching pool containing the same symbolic letters in
the test data window are clustered together to generate
baseline database. PCA model is developed from baseline
database to obtain the statistic threshold and compare with
the statistic value obtained from the test data window to
judge operation status. When a new on-line test data
window is obtained, the same procedure for PM and PCA
detection is repeated again. Fig. 2 gives the weather PM and
PCA detection flow.
Figure 2. Weather PM and PCA method flowchart.
III. CASE STUDY
A. Building Description
One Drexel University campus building – Nesbitt Hall
is chosen to evaluate the proposed fault detection method.
Nesbitt Hall is a seven-story, 78,000 square-foot building
served for Drexel University School of Public Health.
HVAC system in Nesbitt includes a primary cooling system
(one chiller) and a heating system (two heating exchangers
for hot water and VAV reheat respectively) in the basement.
Cooling tower located on the top of Nesbitt Hall is also
monitored. There are three AHU serving for 88 VAV
terminals in each floor. All the devices and subsystems are
monitored by BAS. Totally 540 data measurements are

collected from BAS. Fig. 3 shows the HVAC system
configuration graph in Nesbitt.
Figure 3. System description in the Nesbitt hall.
B. Fault Detection Evaluation
Fault tests were implemented through BAS of Nesbitt in
summer 2016 including sensor fault and actuator fault in
different subsystems. These faults were implemented
through BAS. For example, in Sep. 7, 2016. A sensor
negative bias fault of -2.2°C was implemented on AHU-2
supply air temperature sensor starting from 10:30 to 22:09.
This AHU serves VAV terminals through floor 2 to floor 6,
totally 54 VAV terminals. Firstly, SAX successfully find the
historical outdoor enthalpy information to match the current
outdoor enthalpy information as shown in Figure 4. The
similar operation data in each time window was used as
baseline data for PCA detection. And a statistic threshold
can also be generated for each time window.
Figure 4. Outdoor enthalpy PM result.
A sensor negative bias caused most of zones served by
AHU-2 needed more cooling than the baseline days which
was generated after SAX PM. Therefore, when this fault
was implemented, dampers position of VAV terminal in
most zones opened larger than baseline day to compensate
the cooling needs. Example is given by VAV 2-3-5 and
VAV 2-5-4 as shown in Fig. 5 and Fig. 6. This also
triggered the supply air fan speed in AHU-2 to run at higher
speed than the baseline day as shown in Fig. 7. This fault is
successfully detected by the proposed method as T2
overpasses the threshold, shown in Fig. 8. Although such
fault occurs in one equipment, it causes operation abnormity
in different subsystems and brings strong symptoms.
Therefore, the proposed method can quickly detected it. It is
noticed that through 6:30AM to 7:00AM, T2 overpassed the
threshold. It was because chiller stopped to run during that
period after checking the system operation. Therefore,
abnormal operation of the system in slightly short window
can be more accurately detected.
Figure 5. VAV-2-3-5 damper position in Sep. 7. 2016 and baseline.
Figure 6. VAV-2-5-4 damper position in Sep. 7. 2016 and baseline.
Figure 7. AHU-2 supply air fan speed in Sep. 7. 2016 and baseline.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a weather PM and PCA method is
proposed to detect system-level fault detection. Similar

weather pattern such as outdoor air enthalpy is used to find
and extract the historical BAS database to generate baseline
dataset by using SAX. PCA model. Test cases show that the
method is efficient to detect whole building level faults with
strong symptoms in different sub-systems. Diagnosis
method will be developed based on the detection result.
Figure 8. Fault detection result in Sep. 7. 2016.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The work presented in this paper has been carried out in
the frame of the VOLTTRON Compatible Whole Building
Root-Fault Detection and Diagnosis, funded by Department
of Energy, USA. (DE-FOA-0001167).
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