Journal of Building Engineering 15 (2018) 26–32

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Journal of Building Engineering

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jobe

A practical solution for HVAC prognostics: Failure mode and effects analysis T
in building maintenance
⁎
Chunsheng Yanga, , Weiming Shena, Qiangqiang Chenb, Burak Gunayc
a
National Research Council Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
b
Nanchang University, Nanchang, China
c
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Fault detection, diagnostics, and prognostics (FDD&P) is attracting an amount of attention from building op-
FMEA erators and researchers because it can help greatly improve the performance of building operations by reducing
Work-order energy consumption for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) while improving occupant comfort at
Fault Detection and diagnostics (FDD) the same time. However, FDD&P, particularly HVAC prognostics, for building operations remains with many
Prognostics
challenges due to special operation environments of HVAC systems. These challenges include “tolerance or
HVAC
ignorance” of failures in long-haul operations, lack of operation regulations, and even lack of documents for
HVAC failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), which is a systematic method of identifying and preventing
system, product and process problems. To address some of these challenges, the authors propose an FMEA
method for common building HVAC equipment by exploring work-orders generated by building energy man-
agement systems (BEMS) using a data mining approach. With this FMEA approach, it is possible for building
operators to isolate and prognose faults practically. The FMEA approach also helps us tackle high impact failures,
for which operation data can be acquired and machine learning-based predictive models can be developed. This
paper reports some preliminary results in conducting an HVAC FMEA from a large number of work-orders
obtained from a BEMS in routine operations. The HVAC FMEA will be used as a guidance tool for data gathering
and developing data-driven models for HVAC FDD&P and as a practical solution for HVAC prognostics in case
that predictive models are difficult to develop.

1. Introduction
According to Natural Resources Canada [16] and US Department of
Energy [5], about 15% of the secondary energy used in North America
is dedicated for indoor climate control. Indoor climate control is re-
sponsible for over 10% of the CO2 emissions and a driver for new en-
ergy infrastructure. It is estimated that 25–50% of the energy use in
commercial buildings in the UK is wasted due to improper operating
conditions (i.e., faults) [6]. In order to optimize occupant comfort and
energy use in commercial buildings, researchers have been in-
vestigating methods that can detect and isolate these faults as they
occur and prognose them before they emerge [20].
In buildings, physical faults (i.e., hard-faults) can occur in sensors,
meters, actuators, and equipment. Inappropriate control decisions
executed by (or based on) faulty building systems and components can
cause occupant discomfort and/or waste energy. For example, if an air
handling unit's (AHU) outdoor air intake damper is stuck open, the
fraction of outdoor air in supply air will be higher than intended. This
will increase the space heating loads, and if the heating coil is not sized
to compensate for this fault, indoor temperature setpoints will not be
met. Aside from physical faults, inappropriate control sequencing of the
HVAC systems can cause suboptimalities in buildings’ energy and
comfort performance [2]. It is worth noting that controls programming
is a custom and manual process – thus prone to human errors. For ex-
ample, if an AHU's supply air pressure setpoint is too low, the terminal
variable air volume (VAV) units’ dampers will remain open all the time
and zone temperature setpoints cannot be met.
There is an extensive research literature on HVAC fault detection
and diagnostics (FDD) in buildings. Existing FDD methods can be ca-
tegorized into two groups: rule-based methods [10,11] and perfor-
mance indexing-based methods. Rule-based FDD is built on a set of
expected operational conditions for a building automation system
(BAS). The rules are used to generate alarms for operators to take ne-
cessary actions to fix a potential problem. For instance, a rule may
notify an operator to pay attention to a room's terminal HVAC equip-
ment if the temperature of the room increased above 25 °C. Using a

⁎
Correspondence to: National Research Council Canada, 1200 Montreal Road, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1A 0R6.
E-mail address: Chunsheng.Yang@nrc.gc.ca (C. Yang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2017.10.013
Received 25 July 2017; Received in revised form 29 October 2017; Accepted 31 October 2017
Available online 10 November 2017
2352-7102/ Crown Copyright © 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
C. Yang et al.
Nomenclature
FR Failure rate
CS Critical severity
FMP Failure mode probability
MTBF Mean time between failures
NFc Number of replacements of a component
RN Total numbers of failures from HVAC
UT Total HVAC usage time
Ci The critical number of a failure
Nli The number of failure l with Ci
Tli The span time of failure l at time i
BAcnet International [1] control network, one can program a system to
monitor a subsystem that have direct impacts on that room's tempera-
ture, such that the cause of the unexpected temperature rise can be
monitored. However, such rules may generate too many false positives
(rule too sensitive) or too many false negatives (rule too insensitive) –
because they have no connection with the physics of the problem that it
is attacking. Another limitation of rule-based FDD is that rules cannot
be adapted automatically while building usage changes; operators have
to update the rules when any changes are made in buildings.
Performance indexing-based FDD presents a complex building per-
formance metric as a simple threshold. Most of these FDD methods rely
on the statistical characteristics of the prediction residuals to identify
the performance index. There are two kinds of modelling techniques to
compute residuals: greybox modelling [22,28] and blackbox modelling
[7]. In general, the greybox models are developed as thermal network
models with equivalent thermal resistances and capacitances. These
models are generic and simplified representations of a building's ther-
mophysical characteristics. With sensor and meter data, these models
predict the thermal response of a building – whereby the differences
between a model's timestep ahead predictions and the measurements
are the residuals. The blackbox models [15] are data-driven models
[25] to predict or estimate the heating or cooling load by using machine
learning algorithms [9,17,21,23] such as linear regression [3], artificial
neural network (ANN), and support vector machine (SVM). Most of the
blackbox models are used to predict the energy consumption of build-
ings. Few are able to detect / predict failures from the system behaviour
point of view.
Recently, inverse modelling has been proposed as an approach to
build blackbox and greybox models whose parameters are intended to
characterize the performance of a building instead of estimating space
conditioning loads. For example, the parameters of a blackbox model
which links the effect of outdoor temperature to heating load intensity
can be an indicator of performance deviations. One can compare these
parameters across a building cluster to establish a performance
benchmark. Both greybox and blackbox models are mainly used to
provide the performance indices for FDD at the building level. It is
desirable that FDD&P is able to provide a solution for building opera-
tors to detect, identify, or predict failures at the system level or com-
ponent level [10–12,29]. In particular, a comprehensive FDD&P solu-
tion for HVAC systems is still needed. Unfortunately, in the reviewed
literature, there were not any publications regarding prognostics for
building operation.
As one of the objectives of our on-going project, the authors are
contemplating to develop a novel FDD&P technology for HVAC systems.
The first objective is to develop models which can characterize the
normal behaviour of a component and help us identify failures. Another
objective is to develop machine learning-based prognostic models
which are able to predict a failure before it occurs and to estimate the
remaining useful lifetime, such that a proactive action can be taken to
fix the failure before it detrimentally affects energy and comfort per-
formance of a building. To this end, many challenges are facing us. One
27
Journal of Building Engineering 15 (2018) 26–32
Nl The total number of failure l
RPN Risk Priority Number
AHU Air Handling Unit
BAS Building Automation Systems
VAV Variable Air Volume
SVD Variable Speed Driver
BEMS building Energy Management Systems
FMEA Failure Mode and Effect Analysis
FDD&P Fault Detection, Diagnostics and Prognostic
HVAC Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning
NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration
of these challenges is that there is no failure mode and effects analysis
(FMEA) tool for one to select the failure types for prognostic modelling.
FMEA has been used for fault identification, isolation, and prevention in
the maintenance industry as a systematic method, since it was origin-
ally developed by NASA to enhance the reliability of space program
hardware [4]. Theoretically, FMEA provides a foundation for qualita-
tive reliability, maintainability, safety and logistic analysis; it docu-
ments the relationships between failure causes and failure effects [24].
FMEA has been widely used in safety-related industries such as aero-
space [26] and transportation. In building engineering and operation,
there has been some research to apply FMEA to building maintenance.
For example, Lair et al. [13] and Talon et al. [19] used FMEA to define
failure modes for common building products for estimating reliability
and remaining useful life. Pride [18] provided a solution about how to
use the identified building failure mode to derive reliability centered
maintenance (RCM) program. Unfortunately, there were only a few
publications on developing FMEA for HVAC systems due to the diffi-
culties and unavailable resources since 2010. Some work attempted to
apply FMEA method to model predictive control [30,33] and risk as-
sessment [32] for HVAC systems. The only work which tried to apply
FMEA for HVAC FDD and assurance of reliability was Lv and Liang
[31]. A big technical gap exists between the state of the art of FMEA
and HVAC maintenance. One of the motivations of this work is to
bridge this gap by developing an FMEA tool for HVAC systems from
work-order logs available from building operation. Therefore, the first
task in this work is to develop an FMEA for HVAC systems, which is
able to guide us in focusing on the high impact faults and acquire the
relevant operational data for prognostic modelling.
This paper extends upon previous research [27] by providing new
results obtained from a case study in developing an FMEA for HVAC
systems. The case study demonstrated the feasibility of an FMEA-based
HVAC prognostics methods. This FMEA for HVAC systems was devel-
oped upon a large work-order dataset from 44 buildings in Ottawa,
Canada. The main contributions are summarized as follows. (1) This is a
first attempt to develop FMEA for HVAC systems from historic work-
order dataset. (2) A symptomatic data mining-based approach is pro-
posed for creating an FMEA from work-order dataset; (3) An FMEA-
based method for prognostics of HVAC systems is proposed.
Following this section, the paper discusses the major challenges
facing us in developing prognostic techniques for HVAC systems. Then,
Section 3 presents an overview of the work-order data from routine
building operations or BEMS. Section 4 introduces a data mining-based
method for generating an FMEA for HVAC systems; Section 5 presents
the results obtained from a case study; Section 6 discusses the results
and develops recommendations for future work.
2. Challenges
Building operation is in many ways different from the operation of
other complex systems such as mechanic-electronic systems and aircraft
engines. It is challenging to develop FDD&P for building operation
C. Yang et al.
systems. These challenges can be summarized as follows:
(1) Ignorance of failure features or symptoms
The performance of a building is usually measured or benchmarked
by energy use intensity and occupant comfort. When HVAC systems
suffer any failures, the symptoms of such failures can be easily ig-
nored by operators and occupants. For example, when the room
temperature of an office is too high, occupants may open a window
to cool down the temperature; on the contrary, occupants may in-
crease their clothing insulation. Consequently, the failure of HVAC
systems can be ignored and not reported, even though these ab-
normal room temperatures could be an indication of a high energy
impact failure. Similarly, when an AHU's outdoor air intake damper
is stuck open, the space conditioning loads are expected to increase.
However, with the redundancy in HVAC subsystems (e.g., heating/
cooling coils, zone reheat coils and air dampers, perimeter heaters)
and the practice of oversizing these subsystems, the indoor tem-
peratures can still be maintained within operating setpoints. And,
abnormal operation with damper stuck fault may last for a long
period without being noticed until an energy audit is performed.
Based on authors' experience in working with several large building
clusters, collecting normal operation data from building systems is
very difficult because the ignorance of the faults directly affects the
determination of its onset point (a starting point for failure data).
(2) Improper calibration of sensing systems
In existing buildings, the commissioning work in automation and
control systems is typically conducted before and/or just after the
building is occupied. Continuous commissioning and post-occu-
pancy commissioning are seldom employed [14]. It is worth noting
that there are no regulations to enforce to monitor building systems’
operation by installing proper sensors. Therefore, some sensors
were sometimes installed improperly. And, the sensor data were
never validated or checked routinely. Some sensors may defunct,
and they may remain unnoticed for a long period. Therefore, the
data collected from such sensors may not be trustable and ac-
countable.
(3) Lack of failure datasets
Buildings remain operational despite some failures causing loca-
lized discomfort and energy inefficiencies. Such failures may cause
performance deteriorations, but buildings almost never stop being
operational during their service life. As most failures were not re-
ported for years, it is quite challenging to establish these datasets.
Therefore, there are not many failures reported in the routine
building operation. This creates a challenge for us to obtain com-
prehensive fault symptom datasets from existing BAS.
(4) Lack of knowledge of failure mode and its effect on HVAC systems
In maintenance of complex systems there usually is a well-defined
maintenance vehicle called FMEA which is a useful tool for op-
erators to perform systems maintenance – i.e., identifying failures
and isolating the faults at the system or component level. However,
in the buildings sector, an FMEA tool does not exist for building
operators to perform failure analysis and identify the failures when
a building system suffers any failures. Without FMEA it is also a
challenge for us to concentrate on the vital failures and to gather
relevant historic operation data to develop models for prognostics
of HVAC systems.
(5) Lack of operation data
Existing BASs are installed from original builders or facility op-
erators for regular operations. They provide temporary storage in
terms of trend logs. However, the buffer to store such data is limited
in a small size (e.g., 2k bytes). Therefore, large amounts of data
have been lost and not collected routinely. Permanent data ar-
chiving is a new concept in building operations, and in many
buildings, meter data instead of HVAC operational data have been
collected.
(6) Incomplete data and low-quality data
28
Journal of Building Engineering 15 (2018) 26–32
Today, more and more BEMSs operating on top of BASs are being
developed and installed in commercial buildings to improve the
performance of building operations by monitoring BASs more clo-
sely and scientifically. These BEMSs collect operation data and store
them in a well-designed database. However, such database contains
many dropping data, missing values, and incomplete data due to
different reasons such as power outage, network communication
failures, sensor failures, etc. Sometimes, data tagging cannot be
correctly interpreted as well. BEMS do not necessarily know the
sensor label tags used by BAS vendors. So, a BEMS does not know
what that data represent in the BAS level and it merely records such
data without proper interpretation. The quality of data is not
guaranteed. For example, as mentioned above, sensors may be in-
stalled at improper locations and not correctly calibrated, the data
from such sensors are not trustable, which introduces further
challenges to the data analysis for failure effects and modelling for
FDD&P.
These challenges slow down and even block the development of
FDD&P technologies for building operations, particularly the develop-
ment of prognostics technology. For example, due to the lack of an
FMEA tool, it is difficult to identify the high impact faults that one
should pay more attention when developing FDD&P algorithms or
models. This work aims at addressing this issue by developing an FMEA
for HVAC systems from work-orders and operation data collected
during routine building operations. The developed FMEA will provide a
practical solution for HVAC prognostics in building operation.
3. Work-order overview
Modern building operations generate a large number of work-orders
in routine operations and maintenance. These work-orders contain
some valuable information, including dates, fault symptoms, fault
types, problem descriptions, actions taken to fix the problems, fault
locations (sub-systems or components), causes, etc. Currently there are
two kinds of work-orders: operators’ logbooks and event reports from
BEMSs. This study explored the work-orders collected from a university
campus. It provides much richer and valuable information for devel-
oping FMEA. An illustrative example for such a work-order is shown as
Table 1. The main fields are “description”, “priority”, “date/time’, and
“status”. The meaning of each field is listed in Table 1. In ongoing
commissioning of buildings, large amounts of such building main-
tenance data are generated every day. Many of them are in regard to
routine operations such as changing lights, fixing door, and changing
locks, and so on; only a tiny fraction of the work-orders relates to HVAC
operation and maintenance.
4. FMEA for HVAC
By definition, an FMEA contains useful information presented as
parameters, including Critical Severity (CS) of a failure, Failure Rate
Table 1
A work-order sample.
Item Meaning
Work order ID Record the ID of work order. For example, 3789
Type The type of work order
Location Operation zone code
Description AHU5 appears to be experiencing a return
AirLoeb AHU2, have Brian verify that the cold deck
Temperature on this unit is calibrated and in use.
Job Assignment Who is assigned for the work
Status Case statue, for example, close
Priority The work importance, (1, 2,..0.5)
Created Time 2015-02-09T10:52:48-05:00
Updated Time 2015-12-29T16:17:19-05:00
C. Yang et al.
(FR), Failure Mode Probability (FMP), and Mean Time between Failure
(MTBF), for determining the effects of each failure mode on system
performance. These parameters are useful in determining the policy of
maintenance either for fault isolation or fault prevention. Based on the
standard FMEA definition from NASA [4], the authors propose to create
an FMEA for HVAC systems in building operation. The following is the
definition of the FMEA parameters and methods for computing them
from the building work-orders.
4.1. Definition of main FMEA parameters
Focusing on the work-orders as described above, the authors de-
veloped an FMEA for HVAC systems by generating FMEA parameters:
CS, FR, FMP, MTBF, and Risk Priority Number (RPN). These parameters
are defined in Table 2 and expressed using Eqs. (1)–(5).
1 n
CS =
Nl
∑i =1 Ci Nli
NFc
FR =
UT
NFc
FMP =
RN
Nl
1
MTBF =
Nl
∑ Tli
i=1
RPN = CS⋅FR⋅FMP
where:
• N : The total number of failure l given a period of operation time;
l
• c : The critical number of failure l at level i;
i
• N : The number of failure l with critical number (c );
li i
• NFc: The number of failures of a given component in HVAC systems;
• UT: The total operating hours of a HVAC in a building;
• RN: The total number of failures observed in the work-orders;
• T : The running time for failure l at time i; and
li
• N : The occurrence times of failure l.
l
In developing an FMEA for complex systems such as an aircraft,
usually, FMEA documents are generated during the system design.
Therefore, the parameters above are estimated based on the safety re-
quirements and accelerated test of systems and physical components.
For HVAC systems, there is no such regulation to require industry to
generate FMEA documents during the design phase. Therefore, it is
necessary to compute these parameters from a large number of work-
orders. It assumes that it is possible to obtain sufficient information
from the work-orders. For example, in the case study, the work-orders
over seven years have been collected. Technically to analyse the FMEA
parameters, it is desirable that the operation data corresponding to
work-orders data are available. For instance, to find out CS it is required
to gather building operation information such as energy consumption
and maintenance costs. However, some work-orders provide the in-
formation directly by giving the critical level of failure events. In this
work, such information is used to compute the CS instead of operation
data.
4.2. The proposed FMEA for HVAC
As mentioned above, the proposed FMEA focuses on HVAC at the
system level or component level. From the view point of failure mode,
the proposed FMEA only deals with failure modes of hard faults in
building operation. The soft faults and building envelope failures are
beyond the scope of this paper. In terms of the definition of FMEA
parameters, our proposed FMEA for HVAC systems contains the fol-
lowing main elements for a given failure mode or component:
Journal of Building Engineering 15 (2018) 26–32
• Failure category
• Component (location)
• Failure mode
• Failure effects
• CS
• FR
• FMP
• MTBF
• RPN
The main task is to find out the FMEA parameters defined above
from the work-order dataset based on the proposed procedure as shown
as Fig. 1. This requires a large amount of data to statistically estimate
these parameters. Some parameters such as MTBF require more historic
data. Operational data are mainly used to compute and evaluate the CS
by estimating the impact on energy consumption or thermal comfort. In
(1)
this work, only FMEA parameters defined in Table 2 are computed.
Other information such as location, failure mode and failure effect are
textual data derived from work-orders directly.
(2)
5. A case study
(3)
This section illustrates a case study for developing an FMEA for
HVAC systems at a university campus. This case study aims at de-
monstrating the feasibility of developing a FMEA for HVAC systems
(4)
from work-orders dataset and discussing the use cases of FMEA for
(5) HVAC prognostics or fault identification / isolation. The section con-
sists of an overview of the buildings and work-order dataset, generation
of FMEA, and use cases of the FMEA.
5.1. Description of buildings and work-order dataset
This work uses a work-order dataset collected from 44 buildings in a
university campus, Ottawa, Canada over seven years. Among 44
buildings, 16 were used for academic activities, two for administrative
activities, six for athletics, four for laboratories, and nine for student
housing. The rest were ancillary buildings such as cafeterias, service
restaurants and a clinic. The buildings were built between the 1960s
and 2010s with wide range of the sizes. The detailed characteristics of
the building are referred in Gunay et al. [8].
The work-order records collected in routine building operation
contained brief descriptions created by different operators regarding
the nature of the maintenance work, the building name, and a time-
stamp as shown in Table 1. In addition, a work-order type label (e.g.,
carpentry, administrative services) was attached to each log. Over
seven years, a total of 87,865 work-orders were logged with custom
descriptions. Of them, 20% were related to HVAC, and room lighting
and power plugs. The rest were other facilities management activities
such as administrative services, carpentry, locksmith, furniture moving,
plumbing, water treatment, vehicle maintenance, painting, and custo-
dial services. This paper is concentrated on the work-orders that were
issued to address problems in HVAC, and room lighting and power
Table 2
The definition of FMEA parameters.
Failure parameter Definition
CS Defining the impact and severity of a failure, which can be
computed based on the failure priority and importance
FR Defining the rate that a failure occurs in 1000 h
FMP Defining the probability of a failure occurrence given a
component
MTBF The average time between two failures occurring on a
component or subsystem
RPN Defining the priority of a failure or component by computing
the products of CS, FR, and FMP
29
C. Yang et al. Journal of Building Engineering 15 (2018) 26–32

Fig. 1. The procedure of FMEA generation.

Given failure mode

Retrieving failure events for HVAC

systems

Work-order dataset

Validating failure events

Created FMEA Retrieving operation data for parameter

computation Building
For HVAC
Operation Data

Computing FMEA parameters ((CS, FR, FMP,

MTBF)

plugs. Hereon, the term work-order refers to this group only. How to
extract such work-orders for creating FMEA will be described.
5.2. Generation of FMEA
of the ranking numbers (last column). This list provides useful in-
formation for facility managers to look into these failures. At least it
indicates an order of components to investigate when they receive a
failure report.

Following the proposed methods described above, an FMEA docu-
ment for HVAC systems and components is developed using the work-
order dataset. The first step was to extract the HVAC-related work-or-
ders from a large dataset. This work is focused on the subsystems and
components of common HVAC systems in buildings. Therefore, the
keywords that represent the component names were used to retrieve
relevant work-orders from the dataset. The keywords include %AHU%,
%vent%, %Vent%, % Humidifier %, %a/c%, %Cold Air%, %AHU%, %
temperature%, %Fan%, %fan%, %Damper%, %damper%, %VAV boxes
%, %Vav boxes%, %Valve%, %valve%, %leaking%, %Leaking%,
%Controller%, %controller%, %Coil%, %coil%, %chiller%, %Chiller%,
%Boiler%, and %boiler%. From 87,865 work-order records, 6298 re-
cords related to HVAC are extracted. The distribution of failure events
for each component is shown as in Table 3. The priority numbers re-
present the relative importance of each event. For example, given
equipment “FAN” in the HVAC systems, there were 1695 failure events
over seven years operation. Among these failure events, priority num-
bers are set up at six levels. In other words, there were 59 events for
5.3. Use case of FMEA in building maintenance
The original purpose of developing FMEA for complex systems in
reliability research community is to provide a vehicle for maintainers to
perform fault isolation and fault prevention given a failure model.
Therefore, the FMEA parameters can be used to help isolate faults by
ranking fault detection models [26] and failure prediction by tracking
the remaining useful life for a component based on MTBF. Simply put,
FMEA has two main applications in maintenance industry: fault iden-
tification/isolation and fault prognostics. Therefore, in building op-
eration environment, FMEA can also be applied to fault identification/
isolation and HVAC prognostics.
Table 3
the distribution of 6298 HVAC work-orders.
Components Count Priority set for maintenance
1 2 3 4 5 6

priority level one, and five events for level 2, 645 events for level 3, and FAN(VSD) 1695 59 5 645 28 0 958
so on. As expressed in Eq. (1), the priority level information is used for VALVE 1015 22 5 461 28 4 495
the 6298 work-orders related to HVAC. The FMEA parameters are PUMPS 773 36 3 392 3 3 336
computed using the Eqs. (1)–(5). The Table 4 shows the FMEA para- HUMIDIFIER 580 39 5 281 10 0 245
DAMPER 541 5 1 69 6 2 458
meters obtained from the work-order dataset. With this dataset, it was CHILLER 477 11 7 151 7 0 301
impossible to compute MTBF at this stage because the dataset contains COIL 448 2 0 86 1 0 359
insufficient data to statistically analyse MTBF yet. For instance, the AHU OTHER 426 14 1 229 12 0 170
existing work-order dataset is component or subsystem-based main- BOILER 264 3 1 111 3 0 146
VENT 58 4 1 33 1 0 19
tenance records. To compute MTBF, failure modes oriented work-or-
CONTROLLER 15 0 0 6 0 0 9
ders are required. VAV 6 0 0 4 0 0 6
In Table 4, the bold rows represent the top five components in terms

30
C. Yang et al. Journal of Building Engineering 15 (2018) 26–32

Table 4
the FMEA created for HVAC systems and components.

Component FMEA parameters Rank

CS FR FMP RPN

FAN (VSD) 2.36 24.18 30.27 1728.358 1

VALVE 2.55 14.48 18.49 682.653 2
PUMP 2.78 11.03 13.88 425.750 3
HUMIDIFIER 2.86 8.276 10.38 245.503 4
DAMPER 1.46 7.719 9.70 109.464 6
CHILLER 2.15 6.806 8.04 117.782 5
COIL 1.60 6.392 4.82 49.406 8
AHU OTHER 2.84 6.078 2.96 51.233 7
BOILER 2.36 3.767 1.05 9.353 9
VENT 3.16 0.827 1.05 2.752 10
CONTROLLER 2.20 0.214 0.27 0.126 11
VAV 3.67 0.085 0.14 0.045 12 Fig. 2. Annual work-orders per 1000 m2 for 6 types of buildings.

provide a guideline for HVAC fault isolation or useful information for

For fault isolation, FMEA ranking list provides a guideline for
maintainers to look into the high potential components for a given
failure event. The HVAC fault identification is a complex procedure due
to fault transition and location-unknown nature. Usually an HVAC fault
is a hierarchy chain. An AHU fault can be transferred to zone-level fault
symptom. The HVAC faults can be grouped at three different levels:
plant, AHU, and zone. The ranking information in Table 4 could help
building operators to identify the root component at each level. For
example, if a building operator receives multiple complaints (room x, y,
and z at Zone w are too hot) from the same zone which indicates there
may be an AHU level fault. Therefore, the operators can use the in-
formation provided in Table 4 to generate a sequence of procedures to
isolate the AHU fault. First, they can check if FAN is working normally,
and then check humidifier, damper, coil and controller. This will
greatly reduce the maintenance cost and system downtime by elim-
inating unnecessary maintenance labour cost or unnecessary compo-
nent replacements.
For the prognostic of HVAC systems, the main task is to find out the
remaining useful life of a component or subsystem. Therefore, building
operators can use FR to keep track of the remaining service life. For
example, for a fan equipment, FR indicates a possibility of 24 times
failure over 1000-h operation from the whole campus buildings. Ideally
MTBF is a much more powerful metric than FR for performing HVAC
prognostics. However, as mentioned, the dataset was sufficient data to
compute this parameter. In fact, using MTBF, the usage time of each
component in HVAC systems could be monitored and the remaining
useful life (RUL) can be predicted. This will be discussed in detail in the
next section.
6. Discussions
With the limited dataset, the authors managed to create a pre-
liminary FMEA for HVAC systems given a group of buildings on a
university campus. As shown in Table 4, the majority of FMEA para-
meters could be obtained from the work-order dataset using the pro-
posed methods. These parameters are expected to be useful for building
operators to perform fault isolation or prognostics as a maintenance
guideline. In particular, the “Rank” parameter derived from RPN is
straightforward for fault isolation. For HVAC prognostics, the FMEA
provides a practical solution by tracking component failure rates or
service time. However, there are still several challenges facing us in
developing a FMEA for HVAC systems based on the proposed methods.
Some of these issues are discussed as follows.
6.1. Campus-based FMEA v.s. building-based FMEA
An FMEA is created based on the work-orders collected from all 44
buildings in a university campus. Even though the generated FMEA can
HVAC prognostics, the parameter accuracy remains an issue from the
perspective of a building operator. As we mentioned, the 44 building
are grouped into six different groups or types. Based on the analysis of
work-orders dataset, the frequency of faults was highly dependent on
the building types. Fig. 2 shows the breakdown of the work-order in-
tensity among the six building use types. The research-based buildings
generated more work-orders than other types of buildings.
From the results shown in Fig. 2, it is more meaningful to analyse
the work-orders for different groups of buildings and develop building-
based FMEA which will provide more accurate FMEA information for
building maintenance. However, this requires a larger work-order da-
taset. At least, it is worth considering to create an FMEA tool for each
building group.
6.2. Component-based FMEA vs. failure mode-based FMEA
From Table 4, it is obvious that existing FMEA was created at the
components level. The reason is that we do not have the definition of
the failures for building operation yet. Ideally, FMEA should be gen-
erated based on failure modes instead of the components. However,
there is a major challenge to define a failure mode for HVAC systems in
building operation and maintenance. This issue is being tackled by
defining failure modes at three different level: plant, AHU, and zone-
level. Considering that fault are mutually affected, the authors are
working on the zone level in a building. For example, we are con-
templating four different zone-level failure modes:
(1) indoor air temperature sensor bias,
(2) airflow sensor error,
(3) VAV terminal unit damper stuck (open or closed),
(4) zone electric heater stuck (on or off).
With well-defined failure modes and comprehensive work-order
datasets, it is possible to create FMEA tools corresponding to each
failure mode such that a failure mode-based FMEA could be created.
Basically, for each failure mode multiple failure events should be gen-
erated corresponding to relevant operation data. This is a time con-
suming and costly task. For research purpose, a building performance
simulation tool for data generation is being used. Using simulation data,
it is possible to create a failure mode-based FMEA, which is expected to
be more efficient and effective for conducting FDD&P for HVAC systems
in building operations.
6.3. MTBF computation
Technically, MTBF is defined as the average time between two
failures given a failure mode. Because the FMEA parameters in Table 4
were computed based on components of HVAC systems, it is not

31
C. Yang et al.
possible to compute this powerful parameter for FMEA from the current
work-orders dataset. As mentioned above, this parameter is extremely
important for performing prognostics. To compute this parameter,
failure mode-based FMEA is absolutely requested. This is planned as
future work. The work-orders will be categorized into groups corre-
sponding to distinct failure modes. Then, an FMEA for each failure
mode can be created. With such a failure mode-based FMEA, it will
likely be easier for operators to conduct prognostics for HVAC systems.
6.4. FMEA evaluation
In reliability community, an FMEA is created as part of the system
design to meet certain safety requirements. It is not validated until the
system is put into real use. The FMEA validation, in which the main task
is to validate the correction of each FMEA parameter, is based on the
data collected in practice. In the practice of building maintenance, not
all work-orders were recorded scientifically. Some of them may be is-
sued verbally on the site. Such work-orders may not be recorded in a
formal work-order management system. On the other hand, most of the
work-orders at the zone level were issued upon occupants’ complaints,
such as too hot, too cold, too stuffy, and too noisy. However, as dis-
cussed in Section 2, some faults may not be reported by occupants since
the discomfort level is not high enough to trigger complaint calls. These
situations represent further challenges for researchers to create a new
FMEA or to verify an existing FMEA. In this work, it is impossible to
have an extra dataset for FMEA validation. Thus, the FMEA validation is
left for future work. Considering these limitations, the readers should be
cautious in extending the FMEA results of this study to perform routine
FDD&P tasks.
7. Conclusion
In this paper, the authors put forward a failure mode and effects
analysis (FMEA) method for building HVAC systems in order to provide
a new and robust solution for HVAC prognostics. The proposed method
for generating an FMEA from a building cluster's work-orders was
presented. It addressed some of the current challenges while employing
FDD&P strategies in building HVAC systems and components. Using a
work-order dataset obtained from 44 buildings in Ottawa, Canada, the
work demonstrated how a component-based FMEA was generated fol-
lowing the proposed procedure. The results demonstrated that the de-
veloped FMEA represents a useful tool for building operators to perform
HVAC fault isolation and prognostics. Because of the limitations of the
dataset, a powerful parameter, mean time between failures, was not
estimated, and this is left for future work. With the developed FMEA,
researchers can focus on high-impact failures on HVAC systems and
develop advanced algorithms and models for FDD&P of HVAC systems
in building operation.
Acknowledgement
This work is supported by Natural Resource Canada under Program
of Energy Research and Development (PERD 006605.03).
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