Greetings

In the event the global environment issue becoming critical, the life-cycle quality assurance of the HVAC and other building services systems during the building design, construction, and maintenance is most important in order to realize energy saving with the constraint of reasonable indoor air quality.
 

As everyone knows, it has also become an important subject in our country from the viewpoint of securing sustainable social stock and transforming into recycling society.
To secure the higher quality of an architecture and the building services systems for any new construction as well as existing building, it has been recognized that a commissioning process, through which the quality of energy and environmental performance are defined, documented, verified, tested and monitored through phases of programming, design, construction testing and adjusting and operation and maintenance, plays a decisive role.
 

Commissioning of a new building is the process of defining building owner’s project requirements on the indoor environment and energy performances, managing the process to realize thus defined performances through the design, construction and operation phases by check-and-review, verification, documentation, functional performance tests, staff training and seasonal performance verification, and thus advising building owners to accept operational systems and fulfill their social obligation as well.
 

Application of this process should result in a hygienic, healthy and comfortable indoor environment that was requested by the building owner, by which the regional and global environmental protection through energy saving and reduction of environmental load. such as heat and global warming will be realized. Usability and sustainability of buildings will also be established.
 

We established the (NPO) Building Services Commissioning Association, the BSCA, in August, 2004, in order to solicit Japanese society for this urgent problem and to prepare engineering infrastructure in response to social requirements, which was motivated by the issue of “The Guideline of Building Services Commissioning Process” from the Society of Heating, Air-Conditioning and Sanitary Engineers of Japan, SHASE. Our activity aims at propagation of the commissioning process over the construction society of Japan, that is, building owners, building services design and construction engineers and technicians, operation and maintenance engineers, at establishments of standard documentation and technical tools for commissioning process, and at training, education and qualification of professional commissioning  engineers.
 

In order to achieve these objectives of BSCA, we, not only promoting lecture meetings and symposiums, sometimes co-sponsored by academic societies and governmental bodies, but also were given in trust the research and practical commissioning business in specific facilities of real projects, initial commissioning as well as retro-commissioning, through which live document models and testing protocols of functional performance tests have been stocked. Qualification activities of commissioning engineers, consisting of CxPE (Commissioning Professional Engineer) and CxTE (Commissioning Technical Engineer). By the end of fiscal 2010 more than twenty CxPEs have been qualified, which will give way to qualify and recommend CA (Commissioning Authority) for real building services projects to fulfill  the social requirements in the near future.

As the international activities, we joined the international research projects organized by IEA/ECBCS/Annexes such as Annex40 and Annex 47 for building and HVAC commissioning. The close information exchange by persons and by documents publicized on the website with the leading commissioning NPOs in USA, such as PECI and BCA, have been accelerated and missions, co-sponsored by SHASE, the Society of Heating, Air-conditioning and Sanitary Engineers of Japan, to the NCBC, the National Conference on Building Commissioning, were sent several times.

Unfortunately, some big scandals have taken place several years ago in Japan, where the authorized architects made miscalculation, not knowing whether intentionally or compulsorily under the pressure of construction relating parties caused by cost or fee matters. The incidents resulted in the loss of reliability on building construction process and raised a lot of questions and discussions among professionals, amateurs, scholars and academic societies and, of course, bureaucracies and legislators, which has resulted in reforming architectural and engineering licensing system in Japan. Due to this unhappy event, earnest and pragmatic methodology of a substantial quality assurance in building production will be developed, in which the status of the commissioning process, especially for energy and environmental engineering systems, will be given the civil rights towards the saying “commissioning as usual” and then to the “commissioning as business” as in the United States. 

More recently, in March 2011, the biggest scale of earthquake with M9.0 took place in Tohoku and Kanto area, called as East-Japan Big Earthquake and Disasters that accompanied enormous scale of tsunami and gave fatal damage on villages and structures of Tohoku coastal area, including the first Fukushima nuclear power plant, which resulted in electricity shortage all over Japan not merely in the disastrous area. This is thought the biggest incident after the world war II in 1945 to change people's way of thinking on what the prosperity of a nation is, how valuable it is to reconsider the meaning of human happiness in this beautiful but unstable geography of Japan.  

Taking these vital events and change in social recognition in our mind, exchanging information closely and collaborating on research and development projects in cooperation with allied industries and associated agencies are our strategy to contribute to society.

May we ask for your understanding for our intention and for a warm support to our activity.

   August/2011

NPO BSCA
Nobuo Nakahara, THE CHAIRMAN