Efficient building management with IP-based wireless sensor network

Frontiers of Architectural Research, 2013

The presented work addresses the topic of energy savings in existing public buildings, when no significant retrofits on building envelope or plants can be done and savings can be achieved by designing intelligent ICT-based service to monitor and control environmental conditions, energy loads and plants operation. At the end of 2010 the European Commission, within the Seventh Framework Program, has founded a project entitled ''Smart Energy Efficient Middleware for Public Spaces'' (SEEMPubS). To achieve this goal the project will implement, in a set of demonstrator buildings, an interoperable web-based software and hardware solution for real-time monitoring and control of lighting, heating, ventilation and air conditioning services, through both wired and wireless sensor networks. In this paper the first phase of the project, concerning the selection of the environments to be used as demonstrator and the definition of the control and monitoring strategies to reduce energy consumptions for lighting and air conditioning, are presented.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2013

The presented work addresses the topic of energy savings in existing public buildings, when no significant retrofits on building envelope or plants can be done and savings can be achieved by designing intelligent ICT-based service to monitor and control environmental conditions, energy loads and plants operation. At the end of 2010 the European Commission, within the Seventh Framework Program, has founded a project entitled "Smart Energy Efficient Middleware for Public Spaces" (SEEMPubS). To achieve this goal the project will implement, in a set of demonstrator buildings, an interoperable web-based software and hardware solution for real-time monitoring and control of lighting, heating, ventilation and air conditioning services, through both wired and wireless sensor networks. In this paper the first phase of the project, concerning the selection of the environments to be used as demonstrator and the definition of the control and monitoring strategies to reduce energy consumptions for lighting and air conditioning, are presented.

Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 2012

Wireless sensor and actuator networks Domain-specific framework Sensor programming Building management systems a b s t r a c t Future buildings will be constantly monitored and managed through intelligent systems that allow having information about the building health, keeping a good comfort level for the building inhabitants and optimizing the energy spent. Despite many WSN programming frameworks have been to date developed and, in some cases, applied to support monitoring of buildings, none of them possesses all the specific features needed to develop WSN-based building applications. In this article a multiplatform domain specific framework based on Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs) for enabling efficient and effective management of buildings is presented. The proposed Building Management Framework (BMF) provides powerful abstractions that capture the morphology of buildings to allow for the rapid development and flexible management of pervasive building monitoring applications. The functionalities of the framework are shown in an emblematic case study concerning the SmartEnergyLab that is an effective operating scenario related to the monitoring of the usage of workstations in laboratories and offices. Finally, a performance evaluation of a WSAN running the BMF in terms of network usage and system lifetime is shown.

IEEE Industrial Electronics Magazine, 2016

B uilding automation systems (BAS), or building control systems (BCS), typically consist of building energy management systems (BEMSs), physical security and access control, fire/life safety, and other systems (elevators, public announcements, and closed-circuit television). BEMSs control heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) and lighting systems in buildings; more specifically, they control HVAC's primary components such as air handling units (AHUs), chillers, and heating elements. BEMSs are essential components of modern buildings, tasked with seemingly contradicting requirements-minimizing energy consumption while maintaining occupants' comfort [1]. In the United States, about 40% of total energy consumption and 70% of electricity consumption are spent on buildings

Using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for auditing and managing the energy consumption in a building is an emerging research area that includes a number of novel applications such as activity pattern recognition, adaptive load shifting, and building energy profiling in domestic and industrial settings. This chapter defines the specific requirements for applications of energy management in the building context and proposes a novel framework for building management (BMF) to support heterogeneous platforms. To allow flexible node activity grouping, BMF defines roles and operations derived from the mathematical set theory, while it optimizes transmissions through a mechanism of adaptive packet size. BMF has been implemented and tested in TinyOS. Results show an increase in reliability with respect to existing transmission schemes that can be traded off to reduce energy consumption.

In this paper, we report a methodology, developed in the context of Smart Energy Efficient Middleware for Public Spaces European Project, aimed at exploiting ICT monitoring and control services to reduce energy usage and CO2 footprint in existing buildings. The approach does not require significant construction work as it is based on commercial-off-the-shelf devices and, where present, it exploits and integrates existing building management systems with new sensors and actuator networks. To make this possible, the proposed approach leverages upon the following main contributions: (a) to develop an integrated building automation and control system, (b) to implement a middleware for the energy-efficient buildings domain, (c) to provide a multi-dimensional building information modelling-based visualisation, and (d) to raise people’s awareness about energy efficiency. The research approach adopted in the project started with the selection, as case studies, of representative test and reference rooms in modern and historical buildings chosen for having different requirements and constraints in term of sensing and control technologies. Then, according to the features of the selected rooms, the strategies to reduce the energy consumptions were defined, taking into account the potential savings related to lighting, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems and other device loads (PC, printers, etc.). The strategies include both the control of building services and devices and the monitoring of environmental conditions and energy consumption. In the paper, the energy savings estimated through simulation, for both HVAC and lighting, are presented to highlight the potential of the designed system. After the implementation of the system in the demonstrator, results will be compared with the monitored data.

Smart buildings have been proposed as the solution for the creation of comfortable and energy-efficient living and working spaces. In the last few years, the energy-efficiency aspect is becoming more and more important and as first, a big effort has been put on the optimization of commercial buildings, since they contribute to the 70% of the total energy consumption of an electrical grid and since they are usually already equipped with highly-instrumented distributed systems and infrastructures that simplify the creation of a smart environment. Nevertheless, we think that residential buildings should also be taken into account, since their energy consumption is not negligible (they account for the remaining 30%). Within this context, we analyze the hardware infrastructure, intended as the network of sensors and actuators, of this kind of buildings. Moreover, we discuss which kind of networking infrastructures are needed in order to cope with the particularity of complex residential ...

ACM Computing Surveys, 2014

In recent years, reduction of energy consumption in buildings has increasingly gained interest among researchers mainly due to practical reasons, such as economic advantages and long-term environmental sustainability. Many solutions have been proposed in the literature to address this important issue from complementary perspectives, which are often hard to capture in a comprehensive manner. This survey article aims at providing a structured and unifying treatment of the existing literature on intelligent energy management systems in buildings, with a distinct focus on available architectures and methodology supporting a vision transcending the well-established smart home vision, in favor of the novel Ambient Intelligence paradigm. Our exposition will cover the main architectural components of such systems, beginning with the basic sensory infrastructure, moving on to the data processing engine where energy saving strategies may be enacted, to the user interaction interface subsystem, and finally to the actuation infrastructure necessary to transfer the planned modifications to the environment. For each component we will analyze di↵erent solutions, and we will provide qualitative comparisons, also highlighting the impact that a single design choice can have on the rest of the system.

Energy efficiency has nowadays become one of the most challenging task for both academic and commercial organizations, and this has boosted research on novel fields, such as Ambient Intelligence. In this paper we address the issue of timely and ubiquitous monitoring of building complexes in order to optimize their energy consumption, and present an intelligent system addressed to the typical end user, i.e. the administrator, or responsible operator, of the complex. A three-level architecture has been designed for detecting the presence of the building inhabitants user and understanding their preferences with respect to the environmental conditions in order to optimize the overall energy efficiency of the buildings. Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSAN) are used to remotely monitor and control the environment according to the decisions made by a centralized reasoner. A case study derived from an actual implementation of the system regarding the management of a university build...

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