AHP-CRITIC-based analysis of energy use portraits for central air conditioning cold and heat source systems

In recent years, with the increasing popularity of the application of central air conditioning systems, the air conditioning energy consumption is a growing trend. The air conditioning energy consumption occupies a large proportion in building operation energy consumption. A reasonable central air conditioning system can effectively reduce the building’s demand for energy. For this reason, this paper builds an evaluation index system for the energy use characteristics of central air conditioning cold and heat source systems. The corresponding evaluation indexes are constructed from four aspects, namely, cold/heat energy utilization, electric energy utilization, system energy efficiency and carbon emission characteristics, and a comprehensive evaluation system of indexes is established, which includes the target layer, criterion layer and index layer. Using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the criteria importance though intercriteria correlation (CRITIC), the weights of the indexes are determined and the scores of the comprehensive energy use characteristics are calculated, so as to establish the energy use portrait of the central air conditioning cold and heat source system. Taking the central air conditioning cold and heat source system of an office building as a case, the results of the energy use portrait are obtained for the summer and winter working conditions, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.