Future@TUM: Sustainable Campus Garching
Non-residential buildings often exhibit inefficient operation of their technical systems, leading to high energy consumption and unnecessary emissions. Educational buildings play a special role in this context: they are characterized by a heterogeneous user base and a wide variety of building types, and due to their public visibility, they can serve as role models.
Against this background, “Future@TUM: Sustainable Campus Garching” aims to develop a data-driven living lab that integrates various disciplines of urban and infrastructure planning, such as energy, mobility, and building management. The living lab brings together operations, research, and teaching within the university and enables innovative sustainability measures to be tested, evaluated, and communicated directly in a real-world environment. By combining monitoring, data analysis, and practical implementation, campus processes can be made more efficient and more sustainable.
Within this overarching initiative, this subproject focuses on the data-based analysis of building operations and technical building systems using the ZEI pilot building on the TUM Garching campus as an example. The aim is to systematically record and evaluate the actual operating conditions of the systems. Based on these analyses, targeted optimization potentials are to be identified that can contribute both to reducing energy consumption and lowering emissions. These include, among other aspects, the further development of the operational management of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems, the adaptation of control strategies, and the integration of user behavior into optimization concepts. The impact of different measures with regard to energy efficiency and emission reduction is quantified and can serve as a sound decision-making basis for facility operators.
By combining data-driven analyses, practice-oriented optimizations, and the integration of teaching and research, the project makes an important contribution to achieving climate neutrality in the university’s building stock while also creating a model that can be transferred to other public buildings. In doing so, the potentials of energy-efficient operational management become visible, measurable, and actionable.