WLP+ (Whole Life Performance Plus)

Completed

Energy Efficiency(Residential and commercial)
Not Energy Related
Other Cross-Cutting Technologies or Research(Other Supporting Data)

Basic and strategic applied research

SOCIAL SCIENCES (Business and Management Studies)
SOCIAL SCIENCES (Sociology)
ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Architecture and the Built Environment)

Not Cross-cutting
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Consumer attitudes and behaviour)
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Other sociological economical and environmental impact of energy)

Prof R Gupta
Sch of the Built Environment
Oxford Brookes University

Standard

EPSRC

01 February 2016

31 January 2019

36 months

£150,017

Civil eng. & built environment

South East

NC : Engineering

Prof R Gupta, Sch of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University

Studies from academic literature have demonstrated that staff productivity can be increased by up to 20% by improvingIndoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) such as temperature control, lighting and indoor air quality. The Whole LifePerformance Plus (WLP+) project will deliver a proven methodology for defining and measuring worker productivity, astatistically proven model of IEQ for improving worker productivity, a means of identifying poor office environments, amethodology for reconfiguring poor office environments to make them more productive and a control system for optimisingIEQ in offices in real time. Our approach will also allow performance data from many buildings to be collected from ourcontrol system which will sit over and integrate with existing building management and control systems.The goal of the WLP+ project consortium is to enable commercial building owners to increase staff productivity by 10%while reducing energy use by 30%; targets that we believe are achievable and realistic, based on existing evidence. Sinceexpenditure on staff is at least 40 times higher than expenditure on energy, this offers a strong business case for the WLP+user. The WLP+ project will develop and demonstrate empirically a link between IEQ and staff productivity in contact (call)centres and professional business services buildings where large volumes of staff utilisation, productivity and absenteeismdata are available. The project will then resolve how the IEQ model can be used to monitor and control buildingmanagement and other building control systems to deliver these optimised IEQ conditions over the course of a working dayfor minimum energy input. The WLP+ software solution will dynamically control commercial buildings and identifyinterventions that are required for clients to optimise their working environments and minimise their building energy use.Our target market consists of three customers: end user owners, organisations that own and use their buildings, landlords& developers, who build, manage and rent space to tenants and tenants who rent and use space from landlords. Eachmarket segment is different because of their economic drivers and ability to change or reconfigure their space.The outcome of the project will be the creation of commercial software tool and consultancy offering, creating a businessfor improving staff productivity.The project consortium is led by an SME (LCMB), working in partnership with a major building occupier/owners (KingsCollege and clients of Emcor FM), dissemination partners (British Council for Offices and Constructing Excellence), and aUniversity (Oxford Brookes University (OBU)). The project team brings together highly qualified and specialised individualswith progressive end users to combine cutting edge academic knowledge, data management skills and businessintelligence that goes beyond the benefits each individual partner could achieve in isolation.The project will include seven work packages (WPs):- WP1: Project management and reporting- WP2: Technical definition of the IEQ parameters, staff productivity and energy metrics using available datasets- WP3: Baseline data capture on IEQ, productivity and energy use.- WP4: Deploy improvement interventions to modify IEQ for enhancing productivity and reducing energy use in the test-bedare.- WP5: Software development of WLP+ protocol interface for deployment in building control and management systems offuture projects.- WP6: Testing, validation and refinement of software tool by deploying in a case study commercial office building. - WP7: Dissemination and knowledge exchange

19/03/19