Smart buildings

Considering that energy use in buildings represents more than 40% of global energy consumption and that humans spend 90% of the time indoors, technologies enabling smarter buildings can lead to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and produce a comfortable, efficient and sustainable environment. This is to be achieved through smart sensing, advanced automation, and intelligent computing/communication technologies to efficiently operate, monitor, and maintain buildings. In this talk, two topics will be highlighted, including 1) Integrated Building Energy Management, 2) HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Condition) Fault Detection. For each topic, problem importance, challenges and some of our results obtained thus far will be highlighted. The goal is to demonstrate that Smart Buildings are a fertile problem context for meaningful research and development. The talk will end with a brief introduction of the Technical Committee on Smart Buildings of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS).