The EnerGAware Middleware Platform

IECON 2017, 43rd Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES). Beijing, China.More and more cyber-physical systems and the internet of things push for a multitude of devices and systems, which need to work together to provide the services as required by the users. Nevertheless, the speed of development and the heterogeneity of devices introduces considerable challenges in the development of such systems. This paper describes a solution being implemented in the setting of a serious game scenario, connected to real homes energy consumption. The solution provides a publish-subscribe middleware which is able to seamlessly connect all the components of the system.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

IoT for Energy-Efficiency: connecting a serious game with energy metering in the EnerGAware project

The Internet of Things (IoT) emerged with the potential to change our daily lives and the way we interact and operate with our environment. However, in practice, IoT mixes a multitude of devices and subsystems, which are required to work together to provide the user with the expected quality of service. This leads to considerable development challenges, which are exacerbated by the speed of development and heterogeneity of IoT devices. This communication describes an IoT solution being implemented in the setting of a serious game application, connected to real homes energy consumption. The solution follows a publish-subscribe architecture to decouple the components of the system.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A serious game enhancing social tenants' behavioral change towards energy efficiency

The energy consumption of the current building stock represents about 40% of the total final energy consumption in Europe. New gamification techniques may play a significant role in helping users adopt new and more energy efficient behaviours. This paper presents the advances achieved within the context of the EU-funded project EnerGAware - Energy Game for Awareness of energy efficiency in social housing communities. The main objective of the project, funded by the European Union under the Horizon2020 programme, is to reduce the energy consumption and carbon emissions in a sample of European social housing by changing the energy efficiency behaviour of the social tenants through the implementation of a serious game linked to the real energy use of the participants' homes

Assessing the effectiveness of gamification in reducing domestic energy consumption: Lessons learned from the EnerGAware project

The application of gamification to encourage energy conservation behaviour in house occupants is an emerging field of research. However, empirical evidence of its effectiveness is lacking. This paper presents lessons learnt from the EU-funded EnerGAware research project, in which an innovative serious game (a game designed for purposes other than purely entertainment) was developed to promote reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions by changing social housing tenants’ energy efficiency behaviour. The game was validated in a sample of European social housing using a longitudinal, two-stage experimental design, employing both pre-post and control group approaches. While some aspects of the game did not work as intended, there were nevertheless some positive impacts. The intervention increased social housing tenants’ awareness and engagement in certain energy saving behaviour and provided an average electricity saving of 3.46% and an average gas saving of 7.48%. Although savings were found not to be statistically significant, an effect size was detected (0.2). Therefore, future steps should exploit all available opportunities to replicate the pilot and increase the sample size so as to gain stronger evidence of the game’s impact. Preliminary results support the utility of gaming investment in the household energy efficiency field, and provide useful insights and pathways that could be incorporated into the development of future serious game interventions to foster their effectiveness.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Data fusion strategies for energy efficiency in buildings: Overview, challenges and novel orientations

Recently, tremendous interest has been devoted to develop data fusion strategies for energy efficiency in buildings, where various kinds of information can be processed. However, applying the appropriate data fusion strategy to design an efficient energy efficiency system is not straightforward; it requires a priori knowledge of existing fusion strategies, their applications and their properties. To this regard, seeking to provide the energy research community with a better understanding of data fusion strategies in building energy saving systems, their principles, advantages, and potential applications, this paper proposes an extensive survey of existing data fusion mechanisms deployed to reduce excessive consumption and promote sustainability. We investigate their conceptualizations, advantages, challenges and drawbacks, as well as performing a taxonomy of existing data fusion strategies and other contributing factors. Following, a comprehensive comparison of the state-of-the-art data fusion based energy efficiency frameworks is conducted using various parameters, including data fusion level, data fusion techniques, behavioral change influencer, behavioral change incentive, recorded data, platform architecture, IoT technology and application scenario. Moreover, a novel method for electrical appliance identification is proposed based on the fusion of 2D local texture descriptors, where 1D power signals are transformed into 2D space and treated as images. The empirical evaluation, conducted on three real datasets, shows promising performance, in which up to 99.68% accuracy and 99.52% F1 score have been attained. In addition, various open research challenges and future orientations to improve data fusion based energy efficiency ecosystems are explored