Here is the abstract from an article in the May/June 2012 issue of Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities.
The authors are Rúnar Örn Ágústsson and Per Anker Jensen from Technical University of Denmark.
The complete article, is accessed at the ASCE web library:
http://ascelibrary.org/toc/jpcfev/26/3
Building commissioning has been gaining momentum and awareness within
the building industry as a comprehensive quality assurance process that
can be used throughout the buildings life cycle to ensure that the needs
and requirements the owner has for the building are met. Although
building commissioning is gaining momentum it is still far away from
being viewed as normal practice within the building industry. Of the
countries that are the closest to succeeding in making building
commissioning normal practice, the United States is the leader. To
decrease the time it will take for commissioning to become normal
practice in countries were commissioning is taking its first steps or
has not yet been used, it would be beneficial to learn from the leading
nations on how they have implemented commissioning. Because the United
States is among the leading nations in implementing commissioning, there
is a lot that can be learned from on how that process has evolved and
all the effort that has been put into research on building
commissioning. This article investigates how the commissioning process
is undertaken at a leading commissioning providing consulting company in
Denmark, and presents a case study with a comparison between two
shopping malls out of which one has not been through a commissioning
process, while the other has. The benefits of commissioning are outlined
and proposals for how the process can be improved in the Danish
consulting company compared to the well-established ASHRAE 0-2005
guideline. Finally, the article discusses and concludes what the future
steps for commissioning in a country like Denmark should be based on how
commissioning has evolved in the United States.