Energy demand prediction for the implementation of an energy tariff emulator to trigger demand response in buildings

Buildings are key actors of the electrical gird. As such they have an important role to play in grid stabilization, especially in a context where renewable energies are mandated to become an increasingly important part of the energy mix. Demand response provides a mechanism to reduce or displace electrical demand to better match electrical production. Buildings can be a pool of flexibility for the grid to operate more efficiently. One of the ways to obtain flexibility from building managers and building users is the introduction of variable energy prices which evolve depending on the expected load and energy generation. In the proposed scenario, the wholesale energy price of electricity, a load prediction, and the elasticity of consumers are used by an energy tariff emulator to predict prices to trigger end user flexibility. In this paper, a cluster analysis to classify users is performed and an aggregated energy prediction is realised using Random Forest machine learning algorithm.This paper is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 768614. This paper reflects only the author´s views and neither the Agency nor the Commission are responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein

Non-Invasive Ambient Intelligence in Real Life: Dealing with Noisy Patterns to Help Older People

This paper aims to contribute to the field of ambient intelligence from the perspective of real environments, where noise levels in datasets are significant, by showing how machine learning techniques can contribute to the knowledge creation, by promoting software sensors. The created knowledge can be actionable to develop features helping to deal with problems related to minimally labelled datasets. A case study is presented and analysed, looking to infer high-level rules, which can help to anticipate abnormal activities, and potential benefits of the integration of these technologies are discussed in this context. The contribution also aims to analyse the usage of the models for the transfer of knowledge when different sensors with different settings contribute to the noise levels. Finally, based on the authors’ experience, a framework proposal for creating valuable and aggregated knowledge is depicted.This research was partially funded by Fundación Tecnalia Research & Innovation, and J.O.-M. also wants to recognise the support obtained from the EU RFCS program through project number 793505 ‘4.0 Lean system integrating workers and processes (WISEST)’ and from the grant PRX18/00036 given by the Spanish Secretaría de Estado de Universidades, Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación del Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades

Taking advantage of an existing indoor climate monitorization for measuring occupancy

This paper describes a procedure to gain additional information from an already existing infrastructure primarily designed for other purposes. The deployed sensor network consists of wirelessly communicated indoor climate monitoring sensors, for which it is tried to extend its usage by determining occupancy in the room they are located, in that way the system provides a higher level aspect of the house usage. An elderly caring institution’s building has been monitored for one year obtaining data about temperature, relative humidity and CO2 levels from five different rooms. Such data shows some interesting patterns as the air flow between the rooms which should be considered in any real case scenario. The data has been used to train some machine learning models, which show acceptable quality overall suggesting to use this kind of sensing equipment to perform an occupancy monitoring non-intrusively. The acquired knowledge could bring additional opportunities in the care of the elderly, especially for specific diseases that are usually accompanied by changes in patterns of behaviour. By using the occupancy status it could be possible to determine changes in the daily patterns in that segment of the population which could be an indicative of the initial states of a disease or a worsening in it

Towards Smarter Management of Overtourism in Historic Centres Through Visitor-Flow Monitoring

Historic centres are highly regarded destinations for watching and even participating in diverse and unique forms of cultural expression. Cultural tourism, according to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), is an important and consolidated tourism sector and its strong growth is expected to continue over the coming years. Tourism, the much dreamt of redeemer for historic centres, also represents one of the main threats to heritage conservation: visitors can dynamize an economy, yet the rapid growth of tourism often has negative effects on both built heritage and the lives of local inhabitants. Knowledge of occupancy levels and flows of visiting tourists is key to the efficient management of tourism; the new technologies—the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, and geographic information systems (GIS)—when combined in interconnected networks represent a qualitative leap forward, compared to traditional methods of estimating locations and flows. A methodology is described in this paper for the management of tourism flows that is designed to promote sustainable tourism in historic centres through intelligent support mechanisms. As part of the Smart Heritage City (SHCITY) project, a collection system for visitors is developed. Following data collection via monitoring equipment, the analysis of a set of quantitative indicators yields information that can then be used to analyse visitor flows; enabling city managers to make management decisions when the tourism-carrying capacity is exceeded and gives way to overtourism.Funded by the Interreg Sudoe Programme of the European Regional Development Funds (ERDF

An IoT−based system that aids learning from human behavior: A potential application for the care of the elderly

The goal of this paper is to describe the way of taking advantage of the non-intrusive indoor air quality monitoring system by using data oriented modeling technologies to determine specific human behaviors. The specific goal is to determine when a human presence occurs in a specific room, while the objective is to extend the use of the existing indoor air quality monitoring system to provide a higher level aspect of the house usage. Different models have been trained by means of machine learning algorithms using the available temperature, relative humidity and CO2 levels to determine binary occupation. The paper will discuss the overall acceptable quality provided by those classifiers when operating over new data not previously seen. Therefore, a recommendation on how to proceed is provided, as well as the confidence level regarding the new created knowledge. Such knowledge could bring additional opportunities in the care of the elderly for specific diseases that are usually accompanied by changes in patterns of behavior

Occupancy estimation and people flow prediction in smart environments

Two related problems have been analysed. Inthe one hand, the problem of detecting people by using indoor climate monitoring infrastructure is analysed, while on the other hand, predicting the amount of people in one space based on some criteria is studied. These two problems are grouped in the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research field. In the smart building and cities (SBC) are avarious research paths are gaining increasing attention, especially with the advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and the Big Data analysis. Some hot topics in this research field include city security, surveillance, providing more efficient public services, event scheduling, etc. The analysed problems are introduced with the state of the art for each one, current research paths and possible limitations of the proposed methods are also mentioned. In the last section of this chapter some supervised learning algorithms used in this work are introduced and explained

Modelos epidémicos con control por vacunación

Existen diferentes tipos de modelos epidémicos no lineales en los que las dinámicas de las sub-poblaciones ( susceptibles, infectados , recobrados , vacunados etc. ) están acopladas. La vacunación puede interpretatrse como un control cuyo objetivo es eliminar la infección. Se estudian estos modelos matemáticamente, para despues comprobar los resultados obtenidos mediante simulaciones

An IoT sensor network to model occupancy profiles for energy usage simulation tools

The development of IoT devices has allowed to install large amounts of sensors in different environments. Consequently, monitoring small houses and entire buildings has become possible. In addition, buildings are one of the biggest energy consumers, so the monitoring of the energy waste, and its sources, is gaining attention. Human behaviour has been reported as being the main discrepancy source between energy usage simulations and real usage, thus being able to easily monitor such behaviour will bring greater insight in the building usage. In this paper, an IoT sensor network is proposed to model occupancy profiles at room level. Such measurement of users’ behaviour along with additional information such as temperature or humidity can be used to develop strategies to save energy, especially regarding heating, ventilating and airconditioning (HVAC) systems. The proposed equipment has been gathering data for some months in a workplace containing several meeting rooms. Four of those rooms were monitored and later analysed to test the validity of the proposed approach. The results show that it is possible to obtain occupancy profiles by using simple IoT equipment.Unai Saralegui is grateful to the Tecnalia Research & Innovation Foundation for funding through a PhD fellowship. Olatz Arbelaitz and Javier Muguerza’s research was partially supported by the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government under Grant IT980- 16 and by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and the European Regional Development fund- ERFD (PhysComp project, TIN2017- 85409-P)

Diplomatie Ja, Militär Nein: Deutschland sollte einer Mission am Golf fernbleiben

Die deutsche Regierung erwägt, sich an einer Mission in der Straße von Hormus zur Beobachtung und Sicherung der freien Seefahrt zu beteiligen. Ohne ein Kooperationsgesuch von Staaten im Golf birgt eine solche Entsendung hohe Risiken für eine weitere Eskalation. Frankreichs diplomatischer Vorstoß beim G7-Gipfel in Biarritz ist ein wichtiger Schritt, den Konflikt mit Iran zu entschärfen. Auch Deutschland sollte neue diplomatische Wege einschlagen und einen Gegenpol zur US-Politik bilden

Hardware merkearen bidezko euriaren neurketa seinale akustikoak erabiliz: bideragarritasun-azterketa.

Lan honetan seinale akustikoen bidezko euriaren neurketaren bideragarritasun azterketa burutu da. Hori egiteko hardware merkea erabili da eta Raspberry Pi bat sistemaren kontrolerako. Lortutako emaitzak onak izan dira mota honetako neurketak bideragarriak direla frogatuz