Showing papers by "Mohamed Essaaidi published in 2017"

Monitoring and controlling buildings indoor air quality using WSN-based technologies

Abstract: Ventilation systems operate at buildings level for enhancing air quality by injecting fresher air from outside into inside buildings. In many situations, occupants have to open doors or windows in order to get fresh air. However, in cold or hot periods, or when there are no windows, ventilation systems automatically act on behalf of occupants by insuring good indoor air quality. More precisely, the ventilation controller performs this task by adjusting fresh air as much as needed based on actual indoor CO 2 concentration. Several approaches have been implemented and deployed in real-setting scenarios, but most of them are either time-triggered or are based on fixed threshold values. In this paper, we propose to use contextual data, mainly indoor/outdoor CO 2 concentration, for developing a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based platform for monitoring and ventilation control. A prototype was developed and deployed in a laboratory-based test scenario for ventilation control. Experiments have been conducted and obtained results show the efficiency of the proposed context-driven control approach.

Energy-Efficient Buildings as Complex Socio-technical Systems: Approaches and Challenges

Abstract: On the fast actual demographic trend and increasing comfort level, consumers are becoming more and more demanding in the areas of heating, cooling, ventilation, air conditioning, and lighting. Reducing energy consumption is necessary in all key sectors, such as buildings and construction, cities, and urban areas. Recent studies showed that using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will have a significant impact on improving energy efficiency and occupant comfort in complex real buildings. The main aim is to develop energy efficient control approaches and solutions to improve energy efficiency and occupant comfort by using innovative ICT techniques. These solutions could integrate techniques from different domains mainly intelligent control approaches using context-awareness and predictive analytics with a strong focus on occupant expectation, profile, and behavior. In this chapter, we put more emphasis on the influence of occupants’ activities, complex building’s systems on energy saving by reviewing existing approaches and tools for energy efficiency in complex real buildings.

Smart campus energy management system: advantages, architectures, and the impact of using cloud computing

Abstract: A Microgrid is a subset of smart grid, a small-scale electrical system powered with renewable energy resources that can operate either in a connected or a disconnected mode to/from the main grid. Given that universities are very important electricity consumers, using an academic Microgrid will solve many problems regarding energy usage[1]. The purpose of this paper, is to describe Microgrid components with an emphasis on energy management (EMS). Given its vital role, the paper presents different architectures of an EMS and discusses how cloud computing can be incorporated to the Microgrid architecture to improve the EMS efficiency. The paper concludes with presenting results of EMS data collection using Kaa IoT platform.

Cloud computing and big data: Technologies and applications

Abstract: During the last decade, cloud computing has gained great attention from academia, industry, and government as a new infrastructure requiring slighter investments in hardware platform, staff training, or licensing new software tools. It is defined in the work of Borko and Armando as a new computing paradigm in which resources are provided as services and considered as an infrastructure characterized by its availability, ease of use, and no installation or configuration required from end users. In other words, cloud computing can be seen as a collection of resources and applications that offer the following services. SaaS (Software‐as‐a‐Service) that allows end users to run applications from their PCs, laptops, PDAs, smartphones, or tablets. IaaS (Infrastructure‐as‐a‐Service) that allows users to use cloud's resources as a service. PaaS (Platform‐as‐a‐Service) that gives the users a complete development platform including computing resources and operating systems to develop new services and applications. There are 4 types of cloud computing: public, private, hybrid, and community clouds. Public or external cloud allows all off‐site users to use available resources over the Internet via Web applications or Web services. Private or internal cloud could be built for the exclusive use of 1 client, which takes responsibility for its management and control. The hybrid cloud combines multiple public and private cloud platforms. Finally, community cloud is a cloud‐hosting type in which there is a mutual sharing of the setup among many organizations belonging to a particular community such as trading firms and banks. All these models are devoted to providing users with on‐demand resources while ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) in hardware/CPU performance, bandwidth, and memory capacity together with autonomous and transparent system management. However, despite various efforts to improve the cloud performances, there are still several challenges that need to be addressed. For example, the scalability issue that can be addressed by integrating high‐performance platforms and techniques to increase the computing performance and data storage. Furthermore, security and privacy issues and concerns such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) and phishing attacks are considered among the biggest challenges against the widespread adoption of cloud computing services by organizations and customers. In parallel to the rapid development and deployment of cloud services that provide users with access to services (all the time, everywhere, and in a transparent way), the high volume of data that are generated from physical (ie, devices embedded in the surrounding physical environment and/or carried by the user) and Web sensors (ie, social media like Facebook and Twitter) reinforce the usefulness

Performance analysis of an improved probability-based and counter-based broadcast protocols for VANETs

Abstract: VANETs use many wireless communication techniques to improve driver's safety and transportation efficiency. Therefore, the design of a good broadcasting protocol that performs well in all criteria in order to avoid storm problem, remains the most paramount task. The thriving chore is how to maximize reachability while minimizing saved rebroadcast and end to end delay. Most of prior work maximizes reachability or minimizes the delay, but not both. In This paper, a novel method was proposed to calculate the waiting time of the counter-based and probability-based schemes, based on the speed of the vehicle, to assess the congestion level of the network. Simulation results through ns2 using 802.11P show that the new method give better performances using different mobility scenaios (Grid and highway Map).

Agent Based for Comfort Control in Smart Building

Abstract: Optimizing the energy efficiency of buildings and facilities has actually become essential for interconnecting them through a neighborhood or a metropolis, or more broadly across a territory. From this perspective, it has been mainly developed the information and communications technology (ICT) to assure the building service and communicative/intelligent grids as well. As shown in the present work, the use of ambient intelligence or technologies based on intelligent systems to model and control the behavior of a system involved in building automation contributes to significantly optimize their execution in terms of comfort, safety, and energy savings. In this paper, we suggest an agent-based architecture for smart building control, the prototype implemented in this work is composed of agents developed using JADE (Java Agent Development) framework.

An Energy-Efficient Approach for Controlling Heating and Air-Conditioning Systems

Abstract: Heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in industrial and commercial buildings constitutes 40% of the world energy consumption. Many recent studies put more emphasize on developing efficient control strategies in order to deliver acceptable occupants' comfort while maintaining optimal energy consumption. This paper introduces a state feedback control approach for heating and air conditioning systems by optimizing set points and operation modes while providing the desired indoor environmen's quality at minimum energy consumption. Simulations have been conducted using the BCVTB framework by developing the interface that allows data exchange between EnergyPlus for building's envelope and MATLAB for integrating the proposed controller. Simulation results are reported to show the potential of the state feedback control approach for saving energy while keeping suitable occupant's comfort.