Description of Organization
Veles Construction Ltd. is a full-service construction and renovation company. Veles transforms homes and businesses across the Greater Toronto Area through thoughtful, high‑quality renovations grounded in craftsmanship, clear communication, and sustainable practices. More than builders, the team at Veles are collaborative problem‑solvers who manage projects from concept to completion, combining creative design, rigorous research, and durable, eco‑efficient solutions that prioritize long‑term value and client satisfaction.
In 2026, the company launched a new business arm focused on the energy sector, including services such as energy modelling and auditing. The aim is to help building owners in the GTA cut through fragmented government programs, secure funding, and retrofit their buildings for a lower-carbon future from audit to completion. Rooted in our origins as a renovation and construction firm, our approach prioritizes practical, site-tested solutions over theoretical consulting. Our guidance reflects a deep understanding of field realities, not abstract concepts. By integrating technical building expertise with advanced environmental insight, we serve as the critical link between strategic retrofit planning and tangible, high-performance results.
Problem area
Building energy modelling is an important tool for understanding building performance and identifying opportunities for energy efficiency and decarbonization. However, a major barrier to scaling energy modelling is the extensive manual data collection, interpretation, cleaning, and model-input preparation required before a simulation can begin. Building information is often fragmented across drawings, PDFs, energy audits, equipment schedules, utility bills, spreadsheets, databases, and other sources, and the information is rarely presented in a consistent format. This makes the process time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. As Veles expands its energy auditing, modelling, and deep energy retrofit services through Veles Construction, there is an opportunity to automate this process.
The project will explore how AI, natural language processing, data engineering, and building science can be combined to create an intelligent system that extracts relevant information from diverse building data sources, identifies missing or inconsistent information, and converts it into structured, model-ready inputs for building energy modelling.
Main objectives
- Create a prototype that can process building information and produce structured, model-ready data
- Explore how the structured data could be transferred into an energy modelling workflow such as EnergyPlus/OpenStudio
Scope of work
Key steps for this project will include:
- Assess current building data workflows and how information is collected.
- Explore AI/ML approaches for building information extraction
- Develop data cleaning and validation processes
- Develop a prototype building-data processing workflow
- Investigate integration with energy modelling
- Evaluate and recommend next steps
Deliverables
- Presentation
- Project prototype
Frequency
- Bi-weekly
Skills and training required
- Critical thinking skills
- Data analysis skills
- Communication skills
- OpenStudio (beginner knowledge) is an asset but not required
- Python
- Data engineering
- Data cleaning
- Database design
- SQL
- AI/ML
Resources required
- Building Data (The Veles team will provide)
- Software & Development Tools (Python, EnergyPlus/OpenStudio, Revit/BIM tools, where applicable)
NDA or a commercialization agreement for this project?
Yes