A Scalable and Secure System Architecture for Smart Buildings

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

A cloud IFC-based BIM platform for building energy performance simulation

The BIM Management Platform (BIM-MP) is a digital Building Information Model processing tool, responsible for handling BIM data that conform to the IFC standard. It provides an integrated data management solution for storing, versioning, updating and checking IFC data, which are created and modified by AEC practitioners. The embedded API allows the data exchange between BIM-MP and other online tools which forward IFC files into the BIM-MP repository to perform various operations using different BIM-MP functional modules. Some of the modules create visual and textual reports regarding data quality issues in terms of data consistency, completeness and correctness, while others enrich the IFC data with new IFC objects with the necessary semantic links. All these modules are deployed as standalone containerized applications using the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) design principle

Pipelined Numerical Integration on Reduced Accuracy Architectures for Power System Transient Simulations

This work concerns a dedicated mixed-signal power system dynamic simulator. The equations that describe the behavior of a power system can be decoupled in a large linear system that is handled by the analog part of the hardware, and a set of differential equations. The latter are solved using numerical integration algorithms implemented in dedicated pipelines on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). This data path is operating in a precision-starved environment since is it synthesized using fixed-point arithmetic, as well as it relies on low-precision solutions that come from the analog linear solver. In this paper, the pipelined integration scheme is presented and an assessment of different numerical integration algorithms is performed based on their effect on the final results. It is concluded that in low-precision environments higher order integration algorithms should be preferred when the time step is large, since simpler algorithms result in unacceptable artifacts (extraneous instabilities)

A Digital Twin Platform generating Knowledge Graphs for construction projects

Construction projects combine activities across diverse domains and involve various entities which exchange information in different formats. To connect such diverse entities supporting their data exchanges using semantic web technologies, a Digital Twin Platform (DTP) is introduced, as a part of a greater ICT framework called COGITO, which aims at optimizing and supervising real construction projects from the conceptual to their implementation stages. To perform these connections, DTP creates a digital twin model designed to be the main data pool of COGITO’s application tools. DTP’s digital twin model is populated based on a well-defined ontology combining different data sources such as OpenBIM, time schedule, and construction resource files into a single RDF file. The digital twin model generation and access are demonstrated successfully on simple 4D OpenBIM data

Power network transient stability electronics emulator using mixed-signal calibration

The emerging field of power system emulation for real time smart grid management is very demanding in terms of speed and accuracy. This paper provides detailed information about the electronics calibration process of a high-speed power network emulator dedicated to the transient stability analysis of power systems. This emulator uses mixed-signal hardware to model the dynamic behavior of a power network. Special design allows the self-calibration of the analog electronics through successive measurements and correction steps. The calibration operation guarantees high resolution of the transient stability analysis results, so that they can be reliably used for operational planning and control on real power networks

Mutant KRAS promotes malignant pleural effusion formation

Malignant pleural effusion (MPE) is the lethal consequence of various human cancers metastatic to the pleural cavity. However, the mechanisms responsible for the development of MPE are still obscure. Here we show that mutant KRAS is important for MPE induction in mice. Pleural disseminated, mutant KRAS bearing tumour cells upregulate and systemically release chemokine ligand 2 (CCL2) into the bloodstream to mobilize myeloid cells from the host bone marrow to the pleural space via the spleen. These cells promote MPE formation, as indicated by splenectomy and splenocyte restoration experiments. In addition, KRAS mutations are frequently detected in human MPE and cell lines isolated thereof, but are often lost during automated analyses, as indicated by manual versus automated examination of Sanger sequencing traces. Finally, the novel KRAS inhibitor deltarasin and a monoclonal antibody directed against CCL2 are equally effective against an experimental mouse model of MPE, a result that holds promise for future efficient therapies against the human condition

Distributed Wave Field Synthesis

Many problems in geophysics, acoustics, elasticity theory, cancer treatment, food process control and electrodynamics involve study of wave field synthesis in some form or another. In the present work, the modeling of wave propagation phe- nomena is studied as a static problem, using Finite Element Methods and treating time as an additional spatial dimension. In particular wave field synthesis problems are analyzed using discrete methods. It is shown that a fully finite element based scheme is a very natural and effective method for the solution of such problems. Distributed wave field synthesis in the context of two-dimensional problems is outlined and incorporation of any geometric or material non-linearities is shown to be straightforward. This has significant implications for problems in geophysics or biological media where material inhomogeneities are quite prevalent. Numerical results are presented for several problems referring to media with material inho- mogeneities and predefined absorption profiles. The method can be extended to three dimensional problems involving anisotropic medium properties in a relatively straightforward manner

Wave Field Synthesis Acoustics, Electromagnetics and LC Lattices

By calculating accurately the signals of wave sources following specific techniques, one can use their induced wave fields, in order to synthesize wave patterns with predefined spatial and temporal characteristics, inside various wave media. Using the previous idea, the first part of this thesis presents a linear wave field synthesis method which has potential applications in acoustic and electromagnetic media. Virtual sound reproduction mechanisms used in theaters and teleconference systems, as well as medical devices using ultrasound and electromagnetic radiation, could benefit from this method. The method is compared with traditional acoustic wave field synthesis techniques and simulations demonstrating its applicability on different source topologies with different radiation characteristics are also presented. Unlike the linear analysis of the first part, the second part of this thesis is focused on the theoretical and experimental study of certain nonlinear wave field synthesis phenomena which appear on two dimensional nonlinear LC lattices. More specifically, it is demonstrated how nonlinearity can help in synthesizing high frequency and high power wave pulses at the central points of these lattices, using many low power and low frequency sources at the boundaries. This idea has potential applications in ultra wide band communication and imaging systems and holds a promise of "closing the Terahertz window" formed by the power vs. frequency performance of electronic and optical devices

GeoAware: A Hybrid Indoor and Outdoor Localization Agent for Smart Buildings

Localizing, identifying and authenticating the individual occupants is of paramount importance for the future intelligent buildings. Although the performance of outdoor positioning systems is sufficiently good, the indoor ones have still to converge to a universal interoperable technology. This paper proposes a hybrid, unified localization architecture for indoor and outdoor tracking of the building occupants. By taking advantage of the smartphones and their recent near field communication (NFC) capabilities; a low cost, accurate and scalable localization solution is proposed. This system is a module of an existing, modern building management system (BMS) to which it offers location-aware, energy and comfort management capabilities. The solution is currently deployed as a medium scale trial; therefore, the self-energy use, reliability, ease of use and the privacy requirements are of paramount importance. The system analysis in this paper additionally includes accuracy and battery impact assessment in real-world use cases and location-aware building management operations