43 research outputs found

    Enhancing the efficiency of electricity utilization through home energy management systems within the smart grid framework

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    The concept behind smart grids is the aggregation of “intelligence” into the grid, whether through communication systems technologies that allow broadcast/data reception in real-time, or through monitoring and systems control in an autonomous way. With respect to the technological advancements, in recent years there has been a significant increment in devices and new strategies for the implementation of smart buildings/homes, due to the growing awareness of society in relation to environmental concerns and higher energy costs, so that energy efficiency improvements can provide real gains within modern society. In this perspective, the end-users are seen as active players with the ability to manage their energy resources, for example, microproduction units, domestic loads, electric vehicles and their participation in demand response events. This thesis is focused on identifying application areas where such technologies could bring benefits for their applicability, such as the case of wireless networks, considering the positive and negative points of each protocol available in the market. Moreover, this thesis provides an evaluation of dynamic prices of electricity and peak power, using as an example a system with electric vehicles and energy storage, supported by mixed-integer linear programming, within residential energy management. This thesis will also develop a power measuring prototype designed to process and determine the main electrical measurements and quantify the electrical load connected to a low voltage alternating current system. Finally, two cases studies are proposed regarding the application of model predictive control and thermal regulation for domestic applications with cooling requirements, allowing to minimize energy consumption, considering the restrictions of demand, load and acclimatization in the system

    Mobile KNX: Design, development and analysis of a mobile network bridge for Domotic systems

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    In the last few years, the need to easily control the electrical devices has been manifested with more persistence. This is due to the increasing of energy consumption and the introduction of new concepts, such as green homes and building automation systems. To find a solution to this demand, several companies have focused on the development of infrastructure for remote management system of automation building applications. Based on well-defined protocols and systems for automation building structures, in the current market there are several applications that permit to clients to meet this request. However, it is still possible to improve their quality pushing on automation. Therefore, a central system for automatically processing and sharing the configuration data has been developed, leaving to mobile devices only the task to render it, in order to allow a client to control all the “smart” devices in an automation building system. This project has focused on developing an application that would provide a system of transaction between mobile and automation building world. In addition, a mobile application has been developed for several mobile operating systems and architectures. The work was completed with a testing phase, without the use of simulators, focused on ease of use and speed of access to its devices, which has shown the validity of this idea. The results obtained have given a new set of real data on which basing future developments and also a basis for a different approach to the proble

    Green Buildings and Ambient Intelligence: case study for N.A.S.A. Sustainability Base and future Smart Infrastructures

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    Con la diffusione delle smart infrastructures, espressione con cui ci si riferisce collettivamente ai concetti di smart cities e smart grid, i sistemi di building automation vedono il proprio ruolo espandersi oltre i tradizionali limiti degli ambienti isolati che sono progettati per gestire, supervisionare ed ottimizzare. Da sistemi isolati all’interno di edifici residenziali o commerciali, stanno iniziando ad ottenere un ruolo importante su scala più ampia nell’ambito di scenari più complessi a livello urbano o a livello di infrastruttura. Esempi di questa tendenza possono essere le attuali sperimentazioni in varie città del mondo per automatizzare l’illuminazione pubblica, complessi residenziali diffusi (spesso denominati smart connected comunities) e microgrid locali generate dalla federazione di varie unità residenziali a formare cosidette virtual power plants. A causa di questo processo, ci sono aspettative crescenti circa il potenziale delle reti di automazione di introdurre funzionalità sofisticate da un parte ed efficienza energetica dall’altra, ed entrambi gli aspetti su vasta scala. Sfortunatamente questi due obiettivi sono per diversi motivi in conflitto ed è dunque inevitabile individuare un ragionevole compromesso di progettazione. Questa ricerca realizza una caratterizzazione delle attuali tecnologie di automazione per identificare i termini di tale compromesso, con un’attenzione maggiormente polarizzata sugli aspetti di efficienza energetica, analizzata seguendo un approccio olistico, affrontando diversi aspetti del problema. Indubbiamente, data la complessità del vasto scenario tecnologico delle future smart infrastructures, non c’è una finalità sistematica nel lavoro. Piuttosto si intende fornire un contributo alla conoscenza, dando priorità ad alcune sfide di ricerca che sono altresì spesso sottovalutate. Il Green networking, ovvero l’efficienza energetica nel funzionamento di rete, è una di tali sfide. L’attuale infrastruttura IT globale è costruita su attrezzature che collettivamente consumano 21.4 TWh/anno (Global e-Sustainability Initiative, 2010). Questo è dovuto alla scarsa consapevolezza del fatto che le specifiche dei protocolli di comunicazione hanno varie implicazioni sull’efficienza energetica e alla generale tendenza ad una progettazione ridondante e sovra-dimensionata per il caso peggiore. Questo problema potrebbe essere riscontrato anche nelle reti di automazione, specialmente data la tendenza di cui si discuteva sopra, e in tal caso, queste potrebbero introdurre un ulteriore carbon footprint, in aggiunta a quello della rete internet. In questa ricerca si intende dimensionare tale problema e proporre approcci alternativi agli attuali modelli di hardware e protocollo tipici delle tecnologie di automazione in commercio. Spostandosi dalla rete di controllo all’ambiente fisico, altro obiettivo di questo lavoro è la caratterizzazione di sistemi di gestione automatica dei plug loads, carichi elettrici altrimenti non gestiti da alcun impianto di building automation. Per tali sistemi verranno mostrati i limiti e le potenzialità, identificando potenziali problematiche di design e proponendo un approccio integrato di tali sistemi all’interno di sistemi più ampi di gestione dell’energia. Infine, il meccanismo introdotto nella parte di green networking è potenzialmente in grado di fornire informazioni in tempo reale circa il contesto controllato. Si tratta di un potenziale sfruttabile per sviluppare soluzioni di Demand Side Management, allo scopo di effettuare previsioni di picco e di carico. Questa analisi è attualmente in corso, attraverso una partnership con Enel Distribuzione. With the advent of smart infrastructures, collective expression used here to refer to novel concepts such as smart cities and smart grid, building automation and control networks are having their role expanded beyond the traditional boundaries of the isolated environments they are designed to manage, supervise and optimize. From being confined within residential or commercial buildings as islanded, self-contained systems, they are starting to gain an important role on a wider scale for more complex scenarios at urban or infrastructure level. Example of this ongoing process are current experimental setups in cities worldwide to automate urban street lighting, diffused residential facilities (also often addressed to as smart connected communities) and local micro-grids generated by the federation of several residential units into so-called virtual power plants. Given this underlying process, expectations are dramatically increasing about the potential of control networks to introduce sophisticated features on one side and energy efficiency on the other, and both on a wide scale. Unfortunately, these two objectives are, in several ways, conflicting, and impose to settle for reasonable trade-offs. This research work performs an assessment of current control and automation technologies to identify the terms of this trade-off with a stronger focus on energy efficiency which is analyzed following a holistic approach covering several aspects of the problem. Nevertheless, given the complexity of the wide technology scenario of future smart infrastructure, there isn’t a systematic intention in the work. Rather, this research will aim at providing valuable contribution to the knowledge in the field, prioritizing challenges within the whole picture that are often neglected. Green networking, that is energy efficiency of the very network operation, is one of these challenges. The current worldwide IT infrastructure is built upon networking equipment that collectively consume 21.4 TWh/year (Global e-Sustainability Initiative, 2010). This is the result of an overall unawareness of energy efficiency implications of communication protocols specifications and a tendency toward over-provisioning and redundancy in architecture design. As automation and control networks become global, they may be subject to the same issue and introduce an additional carbon footprint along with that of the internet. This research work performs an assessment of the dimension of this problem and proposes an alternative approach to current hardware and protocol design found in commercial building automation technologies. Shifting from the control network to the physical environment, another objective of this work is related to plug load management systems, which will be characterized as to their performance and limitations, highlighting potential design pitfalls and proposing an approach toward integrating these systems into more general energy management systems. Finally, the mechanism introduced above to increase networking energy efficiency also demonstrated a potential to provide real-time awareness about the context being managed. This potential is currently under investigation for its implications in performing basic load/peak forecasting to support demand side management architectures for the smart grid, through a partnership with the Italian electric utility

    Framework for controlling automation devices based on gestures

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    Nowadays people's routine is becoming more and more fulfilled, when we are at home or in the office we have constant activities, appointments, and meetings. With the growth of technology, there are several ways it can help and even replace people in certain tasks. Nevertheless, many mundane tasks are not yet possible to be done only by a computer or a robot, and machines and people must work together to achieve the objective. Specifically, devices such as sensors or actuators have become very common in our daily life and they are a great help to have a more comfortable environment in our homes or our work, once they allow us to control the lighting, air conditioning, or multimedia, etc. With this in mind, it is important to develop adaptive interfaces that can instantly adjust to the needs and conditions of each user, making people’s activities more efficient. This dissertation presents a framework that performs the integration of human actions, being gestures and/or poses to activate and control devices that have the standard KNX protocol. A pose detection algorithm is used to detect different gestures/poses, where each gesture or group of gestures integrated with KNX allows easy and universal communication with various types of existing automation devices. The algorithm has standard gestures/poses which are obtained by making comparisons between the coordinates (key points) obtained by the pose estimation, comparing the key points, for example, of the wrist and shoulder for detection of a gesture where the user raises the arm vertically. In addition to standard gestures/poses, it is possible to carry out training so that the algorithm can learn new gestures and, in this way, being adaptive for each type of user. This way, with the detection of the user's gesture/pose, an interaction is then made with the home automation different types of equipment by KNX protocol, each user's gesture performs an interaction on the equipment, such as activating, deactivating, changing its intensity or its mode of operation. The results show that the framework is capable of effortlessly controlling different devices with different functionalities.Atualmente a rotina das pessoas está cada vez mais preenchida, quando estamos em casa ou no escritório cumprindo atividades, compromissos e reuniões constantemente. Com o crescimento da tecnologia, existem várias maneiras de auxiliar e até mesmo substituir as pessoas em certas tarefas. No entanto, muitas tarefas mundanas ainda não são possíveis de serem realizadas apenas por um computador ou um robô, e é necessário que a máquina e a pessoa trabalhem juntas para atingir o objetivo. Especificamente, dispositivos como sensores ou atuadores tornaram-se muito comuns no nosso dia a dia e são de grande ajuda para termos um ambiente mais confortável nas nossas casas ou no nosso trabalho, uma vez que nos permitem controlar diferentes sistemas e equipamentos como a iluminação, ar condicionado ou multimídia, etc. Com isso em mente, é importante desenvolver interfaces adaptativas que possam se ajustar instantaneamente às necessidades e condições de cada utilizador, tornando as atividades das pessoas mais simples e eficientes. Esta dissertação apresenta um framework que utiliza a integração de ações humanas, gestos e/ou poses para ativar e controlar dispositivos de automação que possuam o protocolo padrão KNX. O algortimo possui gestos/poses standard onde são obtidos realizando comparações entre as coordenadas (pontos chave - keypoints) obtidas pela pose estimation, comparando os keypoints, por exemplo, do pulso e do ombro para uma deteção de um gesto onde o utilizador levanta o braço verticalmente. Além de gestos/poses standard é possivel realizar o treinamento para que o algortimo aprenda novos gestos e, desta forma, sendo adaptativo para cada tipo de utilizador. Deste modo, com a detecção de gesto/pose do utilizador é então feita uma interação com os equipamentos de domotica por protocolo KNX, cada gesto do utilizador realiza uma interação nos equipamentos, como ativar, desativar, alterar sua intensidade ou seu modo de funcionamento. Os resultados mostram que o framework é capaz de controlar facilmente diferentes dispositivos com diferentes funcionalidades

    Internet of Things Applications - From Research and Innovation to Market Deployment

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    The book aims to provide a broad overview of various topics of Internet of Things from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies, nanoelectronics, cyber physical systems, architecture, interoperability and industrial applications. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC – Internet of Things European Research Cluster from technology to international cooperation and the global "state of play".The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research Agenda and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, development and deployment of IoT at the global level. Internet of Things is creating a revolutionary new paradigm, with opportunities in every industry from Health Care, Pharmaceuticals, Food and Beverage, Agriculture, Computer, Electronics Telecommunications, Automotive, Aeronautics, Transportation Energy and Retail to apply the massive potential of the IoT to achieving real-world solutions. The beneficiaries will include as well semiconductor companies, device and product companies, infrastructure software companies, application software companies, consulting companies, telecommunication and cloud service providers. IoT will create new revenues annually for these stakeholders, and potentially create substantial market share shakeups due to increased technology competition. The IoT will fuel technology innovation by creating the means for machines to communicate many different types of information with one another while contributing in the increased value of information created by the number of interconnections among things and the transformation of the processed information into knowledge shared into the Internet of Everything. The success of IoT depends strongly on enabling technology development, market acceptance and standardization, which provides interoperability, compatibility, reliability, and effective operations on a global scale. The connected devices are part of ecosystems connecting people, processes, data, and things which are communicating in the cloud using the increased storage and computing power and pushing for standardization of communication and metadata. In this context security, privacy, safety, trust have to be address by the product manufacturers through the life cycle of their products from design to the support processes. The IoT developments address the whole IoT spectrum - from devices at the edge to cloud and datacentres on the backend and everything in between, through ecosystems are created by industry, research and application stakeholders that enable real-world use cases to accelerate the Internet of Things and establish open interoperability standards and common architectures for IoT solutions. Enabling technologies such as nanoelectronics, sensors/actuators, cyber-physical systems, intelligent device management, smart gateways, telematics, smart network infrastructure, cloud computing and software technologies will create new products, new services, new interfaces by creating smart environments and smart spaces with applications ranging from Smart Cities, smart transport, buildings, energy, grid, to smart health and life. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• Internet of Things in the industrial context: Time for deployment.• Integration of heterogeneous smart objects, applications and services• Evolution from device to semantic and business interoperability• Software define and virtualization of network resources• Innovation through interoperability and standardisation when everything is connected anytime at anyplace• Dynamic context-aware scalable and trust-based IoT Security, Privacy framework• Federated Cloud service management and the Internet of Things• Internet of Things Application

    Solar Decathlon 2014: Techstyle Haus Project Manual

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    Solar Decathlon 2014 Techstyle Haus Project Manual. The Solar Decathlon competition challenges twenty collegiate teams to design and build sustainable homes that are powered exclusively by solar energy and incorporate sustainable architecture and design. Techstyle Haus is an international Brown University, RISD and University of Applied Sciences Erfurt,Germany collaboration designing a solar passivehaus out of high performance textiles

    A Scalable and Secure System Architecture for Smart Buildings

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    Recent years has seen profound changes in building technologies both in Europe and worldwide. With the emergence of Smart Grid and Smart City concepts, the Smart Building has attracted considerable attention and rapid development. The introduction of novel information and communication technologies (ICT) enables an optimized resource utilization while improving the building performance and occupants' satisfaction over a broad spectrum of operations. However, literature and industry have drawn attention to certain barriers and challenges that inhibit its universal adoption. The Smart Building is a cyber-physical system, which as a whole is more than the sum of its parts. The heterogeneous combination of systems, processes, and practices requires a multidisciplinary research. This work proposes and validates a systems engineering approach to the investigation of the identified challenges and the development of a viable architecture for the future Smart Building. Firstly, a data model for the building management system (BMS) enables a semantic abstraction of both the ICT and the building construction. A high-level application programming interface (API) facilitates the creation of generic management algorithms and external applications, independent from each Smart Building instance, promoting the intelligence portability and lowering the cost. Moreover, the proposed architecture ensures the scalability regardless of the occupant activities and the complexity of the optimization algorithms. Secondly, a real-time message-oriented middleware, as a distributed embedded architecture within the building, empowers the interoperability of the ICT devices and networks and their integration into the BMS. The middleware scales to any building construction regardless of the devices' performance and connectivity limitations, while a secure architecture ensures the integrity of data and operations. An extensive performance and energy efficiency study validates the proposed design. A "building-in-the-loop" emulation system, based on discrete-event simulation, virtualizes the Smart Building elements (e.g., loads, storage, generation, sensors, actuators, users, etc.). The high integration with the message-oriented middleware keeps the BMS agnostic to the virtual nature of the emulated instances. Its cooperative multitasking and immerse parallelism allow the concurrent emulation of hundreds of elements in real time. The virtualization facilitates the development of energy management strategies and financial viability studies on the exact building and occupant activities without a prior investment in the necessary infrastructure. This work concludes with a holistic system evaluation using a case study of a university building as a practical retrofitting estimation. It illustrates the system deployment, and highlights how a currently under development energy management system utilizes the BMS and its data analytics for demand-side management applications

    μGIM - Microgrid intelligent management system based on a multi-agent approach and the active participation of end-users

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    [ES] Los sistemas de potencia y energía están cambiando su paradigma tradicional, de sistemas centralizados a sistemas descentralizados. La aparición de redes inteligentes permite la integración de recursos energéticos descentralizados y promueve la gestión inclusiva que involucra a los usuarios finales, impulsada por la gestión del lado de la demanda, la energía transactiva y la respuesta a la demanda. Garantizar la escalabilidad y la estabilidad del servicio proporcionado por la red, en este nuevo paradigma de redes inteligentes, es más difícil porque no hay una única sala de operaciones centralizada donde se tomen todas las decisiones. Para implementar con éxito redes inteligentes, es necesario combinar esfuerzos entre la ingeniería eléctrica y la ingeniería informática. La ingeniería eléctrica debe garantizar el correcto funcionamiento físico de las redes inteligentes y de sus componentes, estableciendo las bases para un adecuado monitoreo, control, gestión, y métodos de operación. La ingeniería informática desempeña un papel importante al proporcionar los modelos y herramientas computacionales adecuados para administrar y operar la red inteligente y sus partes constituyentes, representando adecuadamente a todos los diferentes actores involucrados. Estos modelos deben considerar los objetivos individuales y comunes de los actores que proporcionan las bases para garantizar interacciones competitivas y cooperativas capaces de satisfacer a los actores individuales, así como cumplir con los requisitos comunes con respecto a la sostenibilidad técnica, ambiental y económica del Sistema. La naturaleza distribuida de las redes inteligentes permite, incentiva y beneficia enormemente la participación activa de los usuarios finales, desde actores grandes hasta actores más pequeños, como los consumidores residenciales. Uno de los principales problemas en la planificación y operación de redes eléctricas es la variación de la demanda de energía, que a menudo se duplica más que durante las horas pico en comparación con la demanda fuera de pico. Tradicionalmente, esta variación dio como resultado la construcción de plantas de generación de energía y grandes inversiones en líneas de red y subestaciones. El uso masivo de fuentes de energía renovables implica mayor volatilidad en lo relativo a la generación, lo que hace que sea más difícil equilibrar el consumo y la generación. La participación de los actores de la red inteligente, habilitada por la energía transactiva y la respuesta a la demanda, puede proporcionar flexibilidad en desde el punto de vista de la demanda, facilitando la operación del sistema y haciendo frente a la creciente participación de las energías renovables. En el ámbito de las redes inteligentes, es posible construir y operar redes más pequeñas, llamadas microrredes. Esas son redes geográficamente limitadas con gestión y operación local. Pueden verse como áreas geográficas restringidas para las cuales la red eléctrica generalmente opera físicamente conectada a la red principal, pero también puede operar en modo isla, lo que proporciona independencia de la red principal. Esta investigación de doctorado, realizada bajo el Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Informática de la Universidad de Salamanca, aborda el estudio y el análisis de la gestión de microrredes, considerando la participación activa de los usuarios finales y la gestión energética de lascarga eléctrica y los recursos energéticos de los usuarios finales. En este trabajo de investigación se ha analizado el uso de conceptos de ingeniería informática, particularmente del campo de la inteligencia artificial, para apoyar la gestión de las microrredes, proponiendo un sistema de gestión inteligente de microrredes (μGIM) basado en un enfoque de múltiples agentes y en la participación activa de usuarios. Esta solución se compone de tres sistemas que combinan hardware y software: el emulador de virtual a realidad (V2R), el enchufe inteligente de conciencia ambiental de Internet de las cosas (EnAPlug), y la computadora de placa única para energía basada en el agente (S4E) para permitir la gestión del lado de la demanda y la energía transactiva. Estos sistemas fueron concebidos, desarrollados y probados para permitir la validación de metodologías de gestión de microrredes, es decir, para la participación de los usuarios finales y para la optimización inteligente de los recursos. Este documento presenta todos los principales modelos y resultados obtenidos durante esta investigación de doctorado, con respecto a análisis de vanguardia, concepción de sistemas, desarrollo de sistemas, resultados de experimentación y descubrimientos principales. Los sistemas se han evaluado en escenarios reales, desde laboratorios hasta sitios piloto. En total, se han publicado veinte artículos científicos, de los cuales nueve se han hecho en revistas especializadas. Esta investigación de doctorado realizó contribuciones a dos proyectos H2020 (DOMINOES y DREAM-GO), dos proyectos ITEA (M2MGrids y SPEAR), tres proyectos portugueses (SIMOCE, NetEffiCity y AVIGAE) y un proyecto con financiación en cascada H2020 (Eco-Rural -IoT)

    Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Energy Efficiency in Domestic Appliances and Lighting

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    At the EEDAL'15 conference 128 papers dealing with energy consumption and energy efficiency improvements for the residential sector have been presented. Papers focused policies and programmes, technologies and consumer behaviour. Special focus was on standards and labels, demand response and smart meters. All the paper s have been peer reviewed by experts in the sector.JRC.F.7-Renewables and Energy Efficienc
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