An energy management system for a smart office environment

The evolution of the electricity grid towards the smart grid paradigm is fostering the integration of distributed renewable energy sources in Smart Buildings: a combination of local power generation, battery storage and controllable loads can greatly increase the energetic self-sufficiency of a Smart Building, enabling it to operate in islanded mode or to participate in an Automatic Demand Response framework, thus taking advantage of time-variable tariffs to achieve economical savings. This paper proposes an energy management system specifically tailored for a Smart Office building, which relies on actual data and on forecasting algorithms to predict the future patterns of both local energy generation and power loads. Performance is compared to the optimal energy usage scheduling, which would be obtained assuming the exact knowledge of the future energy production and consumption trends, showing gaps below 10% w.r.t. the optimum

INTEGRATED ENERGY MANAGEMENT USING COMPUTERIZED CONTROL SYSTEM

The objective of this project is to create an "Integrated Energy Management by Using Central Controlling System". Considering the energy costs increasing day by day and competitive challenge among companies in efficiency rises, implementing smart energy management solutions in offices in order to compensate for the energy losses is necessary. By paying more attention to energy consumption of an office building , one can easily realize how much energy is wasted where it could be saved only by clicking on a tab in the Central Controlling Unit Program in the office. There are so many stand alone energy efficiency devices, but in order for them to fully function in a building environment, an integrated system implemented via computer system is inevitable. This Project focuses on creating an integrated computerized system that can develop a load management profile and control the output equipments such as lights and air conditions, accordingly. Auser friendly program enables the user to adjust the desired preferences of choice which both satisfies the comfort ability of the user and saves energy. This report discusses the methodology and analysis that is requiredto develop such a system

People, process and system design of smart office solution

In a smart building, physical and computational elements such as people, processes and systems are integrated to create an environment that is safe, energy-efficient, comfortable for its occupants. Due to 4th Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0), many organizations are taking initiatives to practice and develop smarter solutions to reduce operation cost using building automations and innovations that also brings values to human productivity. The issue of maintenance and management of office building needed to be study to establish the good proposal of smart building solutions. This research was first determined the people and their responsibilities involving in the building operation of an office building through first phase of purposive sampling interviews. Multiple second phase of process as-is workshop interviews were carried out with building management team and related departments to identify the challenges and issues on maintenance and management issue in office building and their aspiration of modern energy-efficient building. Accordingly, there were 30 respondents from the organization participated in these workshop interviews, 23 type of building operation related processes and 4 main categories of related systems were studied in this research. The office building consisting of a mix of digitalised and manual processes, due to the lack of integration between the different systems employed, it was further complicated by the lack of coordination between the separate departments who work with separate system. These data were then analysed by 8 building experts to introduce a set of proposed smart building solutions for improving the building operation management, promote energy-saving in building system and enhance productivity of occupants. Moreover, the benefits of this research are that the proposed building management solutions can be applied to a variety of smart buildings by considering the building’s physical models, environmental conditions, comfort specifications, occupants’ preferences and safety in the design

Occupancy Detection and People Counting Using WiFi Passive Radar

Occupancy detection and people counting technologies have important uses in many scenarios ranging from management of human resources, optimising energy use in intelligent buildings and improving public services in future smart cities. Wi-Fi based sensing approaches for these applications have attracted significant attention in recent years because of their ubiquitous nature, and ability to preserve the privacy of individuals being counted. In this paper, we present a Passive Wi-Fi Radar (PWR) technique for occupancy detection and people counting. Unlike systems which exploit the Wi-Fi Received Signal Strength (RSS) and Channel State Information (CSI), PWR systems can directly be applied in any environment covered by an existing WiFi local area network without special modifications to the Wi-Fi access point. Specifically, we apply Cross Ambiguity Function (CAF) processing to generate Range-Doppler maps, then we use Time-Frequency transforms to generate Doppler spectrograms, and finally employ a CLEAN algorithm to remove the direct signal interference. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and sliding-window based feature selection scheme is then used for classification. Experimental results collected from a typical office environment are used to validate the proposed PWR system for accurately determining room occupancy, and correctly predict the number of people when using four test subjects in experimental measurements

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.

Connected systems in smart cities: use-cases of integration of buildings information with smart systems

Realisation of smart cities is highly dependent on innovative connections between the deployed systems in the cities. This implies that successfully deployment of individual smart systems which meet citizens’ needs, is not sufficient to make a city smart. Indeed, the smart cities require to innovate and connect establish infrastructures for the citizens and organisations. To enable connected systems in smart cities, the possibilities to exchange and integration information between different systems is essential. Construction industry is one of the domains which owns huge amount of valuable information asset. Buildings information can be utilised to create initiatives associated with various domains like, urban and infrastructure planning, maintenance/facility management, and energy monitoring. However, there are some barriers to realise these initiatives. This paper introduces and elaborates the details about three use-cases which need to utilise buildings information to present innovative smart services. The three use cases are: 1) Energy Usage Monitoring for positive energy usage district areas in Smart Cities (a use case from River City-anonymous name of the city); 2) Services for Facility Management Industry (a use-case from Estates office in Quay University); 3) Safety & risk management for buildings in 3D Hack event in Dublin. Each use-case considers various stakeholders’ perspectives. Also they include elaborated details related to the barriers and challenges associated with utilisation and integration of buildings information. This paper concludes by the detailed barriers to benefit from valuable buildings information to create innovative smart services. Further, recommendations are provided to overcome the presented challenges

Trends in Smart City Development

This report examines the meanings and practices associated with the term 'smart cities.' Smart city initiatives involve three components: information and communication technologies (ICTs) that generate and aggregate data; analytical tools which convert that data into usable information; and organizational structures that encourage collaboration, innovation, and the application of that information to solve public problems