A Trustworthy Building Energy Management System to Enable Direct IoT Devices’ Participation in Demand Response Programs

Nowadays, internet of things devices are becoming more prominent since they can integrate energy management systems. However, data sharing between end-users and other external entities is a concern that must be addressed to ensure data privacy. Given the above, this paper proposes a trustworthy energy management system for energy communities to enable direct internet of things devices’ participation in demand response programs at the community level. This solution is based on a building energy management system framework that considers signed tokens to maintain end-user data privacy and manage data access. Likewise, this solution can plan future demand response events to balance the consumption and generation, using the internet of things device’s flexibility. The results demonstrated that the planned demand response event for one hour efficiently balanced the energy community energy resources, enabling a reduction of approximately 2.8 kWh. Thus, the proposed solution allows safeguarding data ownership rights while efficiently managing energy resources.This article is a result of the project RETINA (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000062), supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The authors acknowledge the support given by Calvin Gonçalves to this work and the support of the GECAD research center (UIDB/00760/2020) for providing to the project team the needed work facilities and equipment.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Collaborative Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays - BigWallHCI 2013 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop

The 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays in Situation Rooms and Monitoring Centres was co-organised by the European Commission Joint Research Centre and the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, Austria. It took place in the European Crisis Management Laboratory (ECML) of the JRC in Ispra, Italy, from 18 to 19 April 2013. 40 participants from stakeholders in the EC, civil protection bodies, academia, and industry attended the workshop. The hardware of large display areas is on the one hand mature since many years and on the other hand changing rapidly and improving constantly. This high pace developments promise amazing new setups with respect to e.g., pixel density or touch interaction. On the software side there are two components with room for improvement: 1. the software provided by the display manufacturers to operate their video walls (source selection, windowing system, layout control) and 2. dedicated ICT systems developed to the very needs of crisis management practitioners and monitoring centre operators. While industry starts to focus more on the collaborative aspects of their operating software already, the customized and tailored ICT applications needed are still missing, unsatisfactory, or very expensive since they have to be developed from scratch many times. Main challenges identified to enhance big wall display systems in crisis management and situation monitoring contexts include: 1. Interaction: Overcome static layouts and/or passive information consumption. 2. Participatory Design & Development: Software needs to meet users’ needs. 3. Development and/or application of Information Visualisation & Visual Analytics principle to support the transition from data to information to knowledge. 4. Information Overload: Proper methods for attention management, automatic interpretation, incident detection, and alarm triggering are needed to deal with the ever growing amount of data to be analysed.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Scenarios for the development of smart grids in the UK: literature review

Smart grids are expected to play a central role in any transition to a low-carbon energy future, and much research is currently underway on practically every area of smart grids. However, it is evident that even basic aspects such as theoretical and operational definitions, are yet to be agreed upon and be clearly defined. Some aspects (efficient management of supply, including intermittent supply, two-way communication between the producer and user of electricity, use of IT technology to respond to and manage demand, and ensuring safe and secure electricity distribution) are more commonly accepted than others (such as smart meters) in defining what comprises a smart grid. It is clear that smart grid developments enjoy political and financial support both at UK and EU levels, and from the majority of related industries. The reasons for this vary and include the hope that smart grids will facilitate the achievement of carbon reduction targets, create new employment opportunities, and reduce costs relevant to energy generation (fewer power stations) and distribution (fewer losses and better stability). However, smart grid development depends on additional factors, beyond the energy industry. These relate to issues of public acceptability of relevant technologies and associated risks (e.g. data safety, privacy, cyber security), pricing, competition, and regulation; implying the involvement of a wide range of players such as the industry, regulators and consumers. The above constitute a complex set of variables and actors, and interactions between them. In order to best explore ways of possible deployment of smart grids, the use of scenarios is most adequate, as they can incorporate several parameters and variables into a coherent storyline. Scenarios have been previously used in the context of smart grids, but have traditionally focused on factors such as economic growth or policy evolution. Important additional socio-technical aspects of smart grids emerge from the literature review in this report and therefore need to be incorporated in our scenarios. These can be grouped into four (interlinked) main categories: supply side aspects, demand side aspects, policy and regulation, and technical aspects.

A gamification framework demonstrating a complete cycle of vehicle driver performance evaluation

Training through a gamified environment motivates the users in achieving optimal outcome and reduces the complexity of learning by adding factor of entertainment in it. The deployment of serious games in automotive industry is a major leap in technological grounds, as it\u2019s a best way to inculcate safe driving patterns to reduce the fatalities and enhance resource usage which includes car accessories and fuel. The Ph.D. thesis represents Gamification platform aimed to Green Mobility and Safe Driving

Diverse perceptions of smart spaces

This is the era of smart technology and of ‘smart’ as a meme, so we have run three workshops to examine the ‘smart’ meme and the exploitation of smart environments. The literature relating to smart spaces focuses primarily on technologies and their capabilities. Our three workshops demonstrated that we require a stronger user focus if we are advantageously to exploit spaces ascribed as smart: we examined the concept of smartness from a variety of perspectives, in collaboration with a broad range of contributors. We have prepared this monograph mainly to report on the third workshop, held at Bournemouth University in April 2012, but do also consider the lessons learned from all three. We conclude with a roadmap for a fourth (and final) workshop, which is intended to emphasise the overarching importance of the humans using the spac

A generic user interface for energy management in smart homes

Abstract Building operating systems play an important role in monitoring energy consumption of devices and improving energy efficiency in household buildings. From this arises a need for a preferably flexible and full-featured user interface to visualize the energy data in the building and allow residents to collect and realize various needs and preferences to the system. This article introduces a generic user interface for building operating systems which is presented from aspects of design, implementation and evaluation. To ensure the user interface can be flexibly adapted to various types of buildings, we design a series of generic data models which are independent of any building operating system. Besides, three roles with different permissions and a number of functional components of the user interface are also introduced in the article. Based on the design, a prototype of such a generic user interface named Building Operating System User Interface (BOS UI) has been implemented to operate the Energy Smart Home Lab (ESHL) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). We evaluate the design, functionality and usability of the BOS UI qualitatively and quantitatively. The evaluation results show that the BOS UI meets a set of desired requirements (except for system configuration) for a generic user interface of building operating systems. Besides this, the evaluation experiments yielded very positive feedback in many aspects including improvement of energy efficiency and user experience. More than 90% of the test users agreed that the BOS UI provided them with enough information and functionalities that they would need in their daily lives and it can help them to save money. Furthermore, the mean score of the System Usability Scale (SUS) is 79.0, which indicates a good usability. The experiments prove that the user interface is still easy to use, despite abundant features are integrated into the system