iSEA: IoT-based smartphone energy assistant for prompting energy-aware behaviors in commercial buildings

Providing personalized energy-use information to individual occupants enables the adoption of energy-aware behaviors in commercial buildings. However, the implementation of individualized feedback still remains challenging due to the difficulties in collecting personalized data, tracking personal behaviors, and delivering personalized tailored information to individual occupants. Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are used in a variety of applications including real-time monitoring, control, and decision-making due to the flexibility of these technologies for fusing different data streams. In this paper, we propose a novel IoT-based smartphone energy assistant (iSEA) framework which prompts energy-aware behaviors in commercial buildings. iSEA tracks individual occupants through tracking their smartphones, uses a deep learning approach to identify their energy usage, and delivers personalized tailored feedback to impact their usage. iSEA particularly uses an energy-use efficiency index (EEI) to understand behaviors and categorize them into efficient and inefficient behaviors. The iSEA architecture includes four layers: physical, cloud, service, and communication. The results of implementing iSEA in a commercial building with ten occupants over a twelve-week duration demonstrate the validity of this approach in enhancing individualized energy-use behaviors. An average of 34% energy savings was measured by tracking occupants’ EEI by the end of the experimental period. In addition, the results demonstrate that commercial building occupants often ignore controlling over lighting systems at their departure events that leads to wasting energy during non-working hours. By utilizing the existing IoT devices in commercial buildings, iSEA significantly contributes to support research efforts into sensing and enhancing energy-aware behaviors at minimal costs

SAT based Enforcement of Domotic Effects in Smart Environments

The emergence of economically viable and efficient sensor technology provided impetus to the development of smart devices (or appliances). Modern smart environments are equipped with a multitude of smart devices and sensors, aimed at delivering intelligent services to the users of smart environments. The presence of these diverse smart devices has raised a major problem of managing environments. A rising solution to the problem is the modeling of user goals and intentions, and then interacting with the environments using user defined goals. `Domotic Effects' is a user goal modeling framework, which provides Ambient Intelligence (AmI) designers and integrators with an abstract layer that enables the definition of generic goals in a smart environment, in a declarative way, which can be used to design and develop intelligent applications. The high-level nature of domotic effects also allows the residents to program their personal space as they see fit: they can define different achievement criteria for a particular generic goal, e.g., by defining a combination of devices having some particular states, by using domain-specific custom operators. This paper describes an approach for the automatic enforcement of domotic effects in case of the Boolean application domain, suitable for intelligent monitoring and control in domotic environments. Effect enforcement is the ability to determine device configurations that can achieve a set of generic goals (domotic effects). The paper also presents an architecture to implement the enforcement of Boolean domotic effects, and results obtained from carried out experiments prove the feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight the responsiveness of the implemented effect enforcement architectur

Software reference architecture for smart environments: Perception

With the increase of intelligent devices, ubiquitous computing is spreading to all scopes of people life. Smart home (or industrial) environments include automation and control devices to save energy, perform tasks, assist and give comfort in order to satisfy specific preferences. This paper focuses on the proposal for Software Reference Architecture for the development of smart applications and their deployment in smart environments. The motivation for this Reference Architecture and its benefits are also explained. The proposal considers three main processes in the software architecture of these applications: perception, reasoning and acting. This paper centres attention on the definition of the Perception process and provides an example for its implementation and subsequent validation of the proposal. The software presented implements the Perception process of a smart environment for a standard office, by retrieving data from the real world and storing it for further reasoning and acting processes. The objectives of this solution include the provision of comfort for the users and the saving of energy in lighting. Through this verification, it is also shown that developments under this proposal produce major benefits within the software life cycle.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2009-14378-C02-01 (ARTEMISA)Junta de Andalucía TIC-8052 (Simon

Energy adaptive buildings:From sensor data to being aware of users

Energie besparen is fundamenteel voor het realiseren van een duurzame energievoorziening. Het besparen van energie draagt bij aan milieudoelstellingen, verbetert de zakelijke positie van landen, en levert werkgelegenheid. Er zijn tal van mogelijkheden voor het behalen van aanzienlijke energiebesparingen in gebouwen gezien individuen en bedrijven gebaat zijn bij energiebesparingen en daardoor zelf de verantwoordelijkheid nemen. Het is bewezen dat het gedrag van gebouwgebruikers een grote impact heeft op de verwarming en ventilatie van ruimtes, en op het energieverbruik van verlichting en huishoudelijke apparaten. Huidige gebouwautomatiseringssystemen kunnen niet overweg met veranderingen in het gedrag van gebruikers en zijn daardoor niet in staat om het energieverbruik terug te dringen met behoud van gebruikerscomfort. Mijn promotieonderzoek wordt gedreven door het doel om een dergelijk energy adaptive building te realiseren dat intelligent systemen aanstuurt en zich aanpast aan de gebruiker en gebruikersactiviteiten door deze te leren, terwijl energieverspilling wordt teruggedrongen. Mijn focus ligt op het ontwikkelen van een framework, beginnende bij de hardware infrastructuur voor sensoren en actuatoren, het verwerken en analyseren van de sensordata, en de nodige informatie over de omgeving en gebruikersactiviteiten verkrijgen zodat het gebouw aangestuurd kan worden. Onze oplossing kan 35% besparen op het totale energieverbruik van een gebouw. Als een succesverhaal, besparen de software systemen zelfs 80% op het energieverbruik van de verlichting in het restaurant van de Bernoulliborg. Wij commercialiseren de resultaten verkregen in ons onderzoek door het oprichten van de start-up SustainableBuildings, een spin-off bedrijf van onze universiteit, om onze oplossing aan te bieden aan kantoorgebouwen.Saving energy is the foundation for achieving a sustainable energy supply. Saving energy contributes to environmental objectives, improves the competitiveness of a country’s businesses, and boosts employment. There are numerous opportunities for achieving significant energy savings in buildings since individuals and businesses have an interest themselves in saving energy and will shoulder the responsibility for doing so.Occupant behaviour has shown to have large impact on space heating and cooling demand, energy consumption of lighting and appliances. Current building automation systems are unable to cope with changes caused by occupants’ behaviour and interaction with the environment, therefore they fail to reduce unnecessary energy consumption while preserving user comfort.My PhD research is driven by the aim of realising such energy adaptive buildings that facilitate intelligent control, that learn and adapt to the building users and their activities, while reducing energy waste. My particular focus is on a framework, going from the hardware infrastructure for sensing and actuating, to processing and analysing sensor data, providing necessary information about the environment and occupants’ activities for the system to produce adaptive control strategies, regulating the environment accordingly.Our solution can save 35% of energy for a single building. As a success story, the software system saves 80 percent on energy spent for lighting in the restaurant of the Bernoulliborg.We are commercialising the results of our research by creating the SustainableBuildings start-up, a spin-off from our university, to offer the solutions to non-residential buildings, first in the Netherlands, and later extending wider

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

Advances in technologies and techniques for ambient intelligence

Human activity attracting a lot of research activity in several fields including the use of wireless sensors, positioning technologies and techniques, embedded computing, remote sensing and energy management among others. There are a number of applications where the results of those investigations can be applied, including ambient intelligence to support human activity, particularly the elderly and disabled people. Ambient intelligence is a new paradigm for the information and communications technologies where the electronic/digital environment takes care of the people presence and their needs, becoming an active, adaptive and responsive environment