Building Efficiency:
Development of an Agent-based Model of the US Commercial Buildings Sector

Achieving commercial building energy-efficiency targets strongly depends on the dynamics between the various market participants and how those dynamics are impacted by different physical and institutional constraints. Modeling can improve the understanding of how a diverse set of players within this market interact and choose to adopt (or not adopt) energy-efficient technologies and/or operations.

Structure of the Commercial Buildings Agent Model (CoBAM).
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To gain enhanced insight into the adoption of energy-efficiency technologies and practices, we need to understand the decision-making processes of market participants. We also need to incorporate that understanding into model frameworks that accommodate disaggregation, heterogeneity, and complexity. Most important, these new analytic tools must allow for a rigorous representation of the changing interactions and feedback between and among the market participants. These dynamic interactions will ultimately shape the pricing, availability, and adoption of energy-efficiency technologies and practices in commercial buildings owner by owner, user by user, supplier by supplier, and location by location.

To fill this need, Argonne developed a sector-wide, agent-based model of the commercial building energy retrofit market to assist research and development planning, market strategies, incentive programs, and policy. Using agent-based methods we represent decision-maker diversity, geographic dispersion, and the highly-complex interactions present in the retrofit markets. The Commercial Buildings Agent Based Model (CoBAM) was developed using the Repast Simphony platform, an open-source agent-based modeling toolkit developed at Argonne.

This project delivered a unique decision tool with long-term utility that can be used to evaluate and develop strategies to meet the Department of Energy's commercial building energy efficiency goals.

This project was funded by U.S. Department of Energy's Building Technologies Program.

August 2012