Graph Based Learning for Building Prediction in Smart Cities

Anticipating pedestrians’ activity is a necessary task for providing a safe and energy efficient environment in an urban area. By locating strategically sensors throughout the city useful information could be obtained. By knowing the average activity of those throughout different days of the week we could identify the typology of the buildings neighboring those sensors. For these type of purposes, clustering methods show great capability forming groups of items that have great similarity intra clusters and dissimilarity inter cluster. Different approaches are made to classify sensors depending on the typology of buildings surrounding them and the mean pedestrians’ counts for different time intervals. By this way, sensors could be classified in different groups according to their activation patterns and the environment in which they are located through clustering processes and using graph convolutional networks. This study reveals that there is a close relationship between the activity pattern of the pedestrians’ and the type of environment sensors that collect pedestrians’ data are located. By this way, institutions could alleviate a great amount of effort needed to ensure safe and energy efficient urban areas, only knowing the typology of buildings of an urban zone

New tools to support the designing of efficient and reliable ground source heat exchangers: the Cheap-GSHPs databases and maps

Abstract. The final aim of the EU funded Cheap-GSHPs project is to reduce the total installation cost of closed-loop shallow geothermal systems. As part of the project a Decision Support System (DSS) has been developed and released on the web, in order to support the design of new closed-loop geo-exchange systems. The Cheap-GSHP project addresses all the aspects involved in planning and dimensioning a new borefield and therefore, the DSS is composed of several databases and tools that collect and elaborate the preliminary data and information that are necessary during the sizing phase, such as the geological and drilling aspects as well as the heating and cooling building demand. This paper briefly introduces the content of the databases and the mapping methodology developed for the Cheap-GSHPs DSS. All these researches are further deepen in the EU project GEO4CIVHIC, with a special attention to the application of shallow geothermal systems for building conditioning to historical buildings.</p

Improved HVAC commissioning using wireless sensor networks

Commercial buildings present a significant potential for energy saving, in particular through the operation of their air-conditioning systems. Regulations and policies are driving to- wards better energy efficiency, but are mainly focused on the design stages. In practice, there is a performance gap between design and operation of new buildings. One of the causes of this gap is the failure to commission buildings for energy efficiency and comfort. Historically commissioning is limited to design compliance and security checks and would need to scale up to account for the necessity of reducing new buildings’ energy foot- print. However, due to inevitable delays in the construction process, commissioning tends to stop when the building reaches ‘practical completion’. It is thus difficult to increase the commissioning scope pre-handover. Additionally, currently available measurements are not suitable to go through the remaining ‘snag’ list or understand comfort and energy issues. This thesis examines the potential and practicality of using wireless sensor networks (WSN) to perform a post occupancy commissioning (PO-Cx) process for energy and occu- pants’ comfort performance. Requirements for such a WSN are determined from analysing building commissioning practices and the faults they fail to identify. An ad hoc WSN prototype is developed and verified. A proof of concept is established through a six-month deployment on a newly refurbished university building. It is concluded that WSN is a key tool to integrate energy performance and comfort to the commissioning of new buildings. The possibility to install them with minimum disruption of an occupied building and to analysis the data remotely means that it is easy to perform additional commissioning tasks post-handover. Recommendations to develop a commercial WSN for PO-Cx application are given and general strategies for PO-Cx are discussed based on the experience acquired.Open Acces