Buildings are among the largest consumers of electricity in the US. A significant portion of this energy use in buildings can be attributed to HVAC systems used to maintain comfort for occupants. In most cases these building HVAC systems run on fixed schedules and do not employ any fine grained control based on detailed occupancy information. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a presence sensor platform that can be used for accurate occupancy detection at the level of individual offices. Our presence sensor is low-cost, wireless, and incrementally deployable within existing buildings. Using a pilot deployment of our system across ten offices over a two week period we identify significant opportunities for energy savings due to periods of vacancy. Our energy measurements show that our presence node has an estimated battery lifetime of over five years, while detecting occupancy accurately. Furthermore, using a building simulation framework and the occupancy information from our testbed, we show potential energy savings from 10% to 15% using our system.

[ACM Press the 2nd ACM Workshop - Zurich, Switzerland (2010.11.02-2010.11.02)] Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficiency in Building - BuildSys \'10 - Occupancy-driven energy management for smart building automation

https://orca.cf.ac.uk/88855/1/Metering_final-version.pdf

Building energy metering and environmental monitoring – A state-of-the-art review and directions for future research

With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as smartphones, sensors, cameras, and RFIDs, it is possible to collect massive amount of data for localization and tracking of people within commercial buildings. Enabled by such occupancy monitoring capabilities, there are extensive opportunities for improving the energy consumption of buildings via smart HVAC control. In this respect, the major challenges we envision are 1) to achieve occupancy monitoring in a minimally intrusive way, e.g., using the existing infrastructure in the buildings and not requiring installation of any apps in the users’ smart devices, and 2) to develop effective data fusion techniques for improving occupancy monitoring accuracy using a multitude of sources. This paper surveys the existing works on occupancy monitoring and multi-modal data fusion techniques for smart commercial buildings. The goal is to lay down a framework for future research to exploit the spatio-temporal data obtained from one or more of various IoT devices such as temperature sensors, surveillance cameras, and RFID tags that may be already in use in the buildings. A comparative analysis of existing approaches and future predictions for research challenges are also provided.

IoT-based occupancy monitoring techniques for energy-efficient smart buildings

Human-in-the-loop HVAC operations: A quantitative review on occupancy, comfort, and energy-efficiency dimensions

Building occupancy estimation and detection: A review

Commercial buildings contribute to 19% of the primary energy consumption in the US, with HVAC systems accounting for 39.6% of this usage. To reduce HVAC energy use, prior studies have proposed using wireless occupancy sensors or even cameras for occupancy based actuation showing energy savings of up to 42%. However, most of these solutions require these sensors and the associated network to be designed, deployed, tested and maintained within existing buildings which is significantly costly.We present Sentinel, a system that leverages existing WiFi infrastructure in commercial buildings along with smartphones with WiFi connectivity carried by building occupants to provide fine-grained occupancy based HVAC actuation. We have implemented Sentinel on top of RESTful web services, and demonstrate that it is scalable and compatible with legacy building management. We show that Sentinel accurately determines the occupancy in office spaces 86% of the time, with 6.2% false negative errors. We high-light the reasons for the inaccuracies, mostly attributed to aggressive power management by smartphones. Finally, we actuate 23% of the HVAC zones within a commercial building using Sentinel for one day and measure HVAC electrical energy savings of 17.8%.

/pdf/sentinel-occupancy-based-hvac-actuation-using-existing-wifi-ijblyya0iv.pdf

Sentinel: occupancy based HVAC actuation using existing WiFi infrastructure within commercial buildings

Improving energy efficiency in buildings is a key objective for sensor researchers and promises significant reductions in energy usage across the world. The key technological driver for these gains are the novel sensor network deployments and the large amounts of data that they generate. The challenge however is making sense of this data, and using it effectively to design smarter building control schemes. Several recent research efforts have sought to address the challenge of data access and building control. However, while these systems have made progress in specific areas, many unanswered questions still revolve around data management and what exactly it means to develop building applications. Critically, how would such a solution work in a real building setting and how can applications be written such that they can be re-used in other settings? To resolve these issues we have developed BuildingDepot 2.0, a building management control platform that significantly updates on our first iteration of the system for data analysis and high level supervisory control.

/pdf/buildingdepot-2-0-an-integrated-management-system-for-34vwo11041.pdf

BuildingDepot 2.0: An Integrated Management System for Building Analysis and Control

"The search for biomarkers of stress and health remains a challenging task for researchers and clinicians alike," as noted in [9]. Against this backdrop, the recent emergence of medical devices that can collect time series for long durations at very high sampling rates makes it possible to study temporal patterns in biophysical signals. We demonstrate a functional system to collect and analyze physiological signals, and provide real-time feedback to the end user.

Bliss Buzzer, a system to monitor health and stress with real-time feedback

Establishing radio communication between military commanders, soldiers and law enforcement officers is an important enabling capability to facilitate interoperability. The Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program is enabling communications within the military by implementing different military radio waveforms on software defined radio (SDR) platforms. It is logical to include a Project 25 (P25) public safety waveform in the JTRS waveform portfolio. This paper describes the rapid development of a P25 waveform on a surrogate JTRS SDR platform. The development process and methodology, which starts from a platform agnostic executable waveform model in Matlab, through an intermediate implementation using open tools on generic platforms, to the final platform-specific implementation, is introduced and discussed. This paper shows that adopting this methodology can speed up waveform development and porting. Furthermore, this paper presents the design and implementation of a three way voice bridge among P25, the future multiband multiwaveform modular tactical radio (FM3TR), and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), with software communication architecture (SCA) compliant implementation for both the P25 and FM3TR waveforms. This paper shows that critical issues such as interoperability can be tackled efficiently by leveraging SDR and SCA.

Design and rapid prototyping of SCA-compliant public safety P25 waveform and P25---FM3TR---VoIP bridge

Past disaster response experience, as well as existing terrorism threats, demands close collaboration between the military and public safety command structure in possible future operations. Establishing radio communication between military commanders, soldiers and law enforcement officers is an important enabling capability to facilitate interoperability. The JTRS program is enabling communications between military branches by implementing different military radio waveforms on JTRS software-defined radio platforms. Therefore, it is natural to include a Project 25 (P25) public safety digital radio waveform in the JTRS waveform portfolio. This paper describes the rapid development of a P25 waveform on the Spectrum Signal Processing SDR-4000, a surrogate JTRS software-defined radio platform. The development process and methodology, which starts from a platform-agnostic executable waveform model in Matlab, through an intermediate implementation using open tools on generic platforms, to the final platform-specific implementation, is introduced and discussed. This paper shows that adopting this methodology can speed up waveform development and porting.

Anthony Nwokafor

Papers

Sentinel: occupancy based HVAC actuation using existing WiFi infrastructure within commercial buildings

BuildingDepot 2.0: An Integrated Management System for Building Analysis and Control

Bliss Buzzer, a system to monitor health and stress with real-time feedback

Design and rapid prototyping of SCA-compliant public safety P25 waveform and P25---FM3TR---VoIP bridge

Rapid development of a P25 JTRS waveform