An IoT sensor network to model occupancy profiles for energy usage simulation tools

Abstract

The development of IoT devices has allowed to install large amounts of sensors in different environments. Consequently, monitoring small houses and entire buildings has become possible. In addition, buildings are one of the biggest energy consumers, so the monitoring of the energy waste, and its sources, is gaining attention. Human behaviour has been reported as being the main discrepancy source between energy usage simulations and real usage, thus being able to easily monitor such behaviour will bring greater insight in the building usage. In this paper, an IoT sensor network is proposed to model occupancy profiles at room level. Such measurement of users’ behaviour along with additional information such as temperature or humidity can be used to develop strategies to save energy, especially regarding heating, ventilating and airconditioning (HVAC) systems. The proposed equipment has been gathering data for some months in a workplace containing several meeting rooms. Four of those rooms were monitored and later analysed to test the validity of the proposed approach. The results show that it is possible to obtain occupancy profiles by using simple IoT equipment.Unai Saralegui is grateful to the Tecnalia Research & Innovation Foundation for funding through a PhD fellowship. Olatz Arbelaitz and Javier Muguerza’s research was partially supported by the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government under Grant IT980- 16 and by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and the European Regional Development fund- ERFD (PhysComp project, TIN2017- 85409-P)