Building Automation: Where is it Today and Where it Should be

Sensors, actuators, and controllers, which collectively serve as the backbone of cyberphysical systems for building energy management, are one of the core technical areas of investment for achieving the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building Technologies Office's (BTO's) goals for energy affordability in the national building stock-both commercial and residential. In fact, an aggregated annual energy savings of 29% is estimated in the commercial sector alone through the implementation of efficiency measures using current state-of-the-art sensors and controls to retune buildings by optimizing programmable settings based on occupant schedules and comfort requirements, as well as detecting and diagnosing equipment operation and installation problems (Fernandez et al. 2017). Monitoring and control of building conditions and operations has advanced significantly, from the invention of the modern thermostat just before the start of the 20 th century to the midcentury incorporation of direct digital control into devices, the introduction of open protocols and network communications at the end of the century, and finally the invention of cloud-based computing and additional advancements that have enabled remote operation and a proliferation of connected and intelligent devices in building automation. Despite this potential, however, two main challenges hinder widespread adoption of sensors and controls in building operations that can ensure savings for high-efficiency components and equipment (e.g., heat pumps, windows, and lighting devices), as well as additional savings from more sophisticated control architectures and algorithms. First, centralized monitoring and control of operations through building automation systems (BAS) are prevalent in only 8% of floor space for small commercial buildings (<50,000 square feet) and 46% of floor space for large commercial buildings (>50,000 square feet) in the United States. This translates to 43% of the total floor space for the commercial building stock (U.S. Energy Information Administration [EIA] 2016). Similar to small commercial buildings, residential buildings typically do not have a centralized management system, although smart home assistants are beginning to take on this role. In the residential sector as of 2015, 41% of buildings had some type of programmable thermostat installed, but only 12% used the programmable functionality, and only 3% had a smart or learning thermostat that learns occupant behavior over time, eliminating the need for continual user activity (U.S. EIA 2017c). This number is steadily growing, with 40% of the 40 million thermostats sold in 2015 classified as smart (Parks Associates 2015). Second, most centralized systems currently installed exclusively manage heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC). These systems are typically separated from control of other building end uses such as common area lighting and plug loads. For example, home energy management systems usually consist of programmable thermostats for central and single-zone space conditioning, rather than more holistic management across multiple loads and appliances. Even modern systems incorporate a limited range of inputs and prescriptively map these inputs to control strategies to meet occupant needs and sometimes save energy. Much of installed equipment in buildings today is also not capable of digital communication and control. These conditions result in approaches that are customized in nature with new devices managing their own operation through built-in capabilities and intelligence. While efforts to embed intelligence in buildings that enable "smart" operations for energy management have proliferated in the past decade, they have generally lagged behind other sectors and applications (e.g., largescale industrial process plants, automotive, aerospace) due to several factors. These include utilization in less operationally critical applications (e.g., occupant comfort instead of safety and security); the fragmented nature of the buildings market (e.g., owner-owned and tenant-occupied); the customized nature of incorporating intelligence into building equipment rather than integrating into the design process; and the diversity of systems configurations and limited modeling and integration capabilities of stochastic variables (e.g., occupants, weather forecasts). As such, building controls are still predominately designed to meet short-term thermal and ventilation loads and are rule-based and reactive, rather than adaptive and autonomous, in nature. 2 Calculated based on EIA AEO 2017 data using Scout tool. 3 Cost premium based on 1-year payback period. 4 Full technical potential assuming no competition with measures from other technologies. 5 Based on all residential buildings; single/mobile homes use 0.0021 nodes/ft 2 floor and make up ~87% of all residential square footage (from residential EIA AEO 2017 microtables); multifamily homes use 0.0041 nodes/ft 2 floor and make up ~13% of all residential square footage (EIA AEO 2017 microtables). 6 Based on 0.002 nodes/ft 2 for large office commercial building. 7 Based on all commercial building types. INNOVATIONS IN SENSORS AND CONTROLS FOR BUILDING ENERGY MANAGEMENT: Research and Development Opportunities Report for Emerging Technologies xi INNOVATIONS IN SENSORS AND CONTROLS FOR BUILDING ENERGY MANAGEMENT: Research and Development Opportunities Report for Emerging Technologies xii 10 End uses labeled "other" include: for residential (small electric devices, heating elements, motors, swimming pool and hot tub heaters, outdoor grills, and any energy attributable to the residential buildings sector, but not directly to specific end uses) and for commercial (service station equipment, automated teller machines, telecommunications equipment, medical equipment, pumps, emergency electric generators, combined heat and power in commercial buildings, manufacturing performed in commercial buildings, and any energy attributable to the commercial buildings sector, but not directly to specific end uses).

Proceedings from ICEBO 2013

This paper addresses the issue of the misunderstandings surrounding the terms intelligent and smart when applied to modern buildings. The terms have increasingly been used interchangeably which has led to confusion for designers, researchers and clients.

This paper presents the design and implementation details of an Artificial Intelligent based smart building automation controller (AIBSBAC). It has the capability to perform intelligently adaptive to user preferences, which are focused on improved user comfort, safety and enhanced energy performance. The design of AIBSBAC consists of subsystems of smart user identification, internal and external environment observation subsystems, an artificial intelligent decision making subsystem and also a universal infrared communication system. Furthermore, the design architecture of AIBSBAC facilitates quick install flexible plug and play concept for most of the residential and buildings automation applications without a barrier to infrastructure modifications in installation.

2012 IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics, 2012

The implementation of components and systems of building automation, in particular for HVAC systems and renewables, opens the possibility to increase the energy efficiency of (clusters of) buildings even further than originally intended. By additionally implementing different control strategies, it is possible to use the thermal storage capacity of buildings to improve their electrical characteristic in order to better meet the needs of the electricity grid. However, it is usually hard to obtain the thermal storage parameters of a building, because they need to be computed in complex thermal simulations. In this paper we present a way to quickly estimate an approximation thereof and feed it to strategies of different complexity, dependent on the free resources of the building automation installation.