Towards more Efficient Building Energy Management Systems

As a first step towards developing efficient building energy management techniques, in this paper, we first study the energy consumption patterns of heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC) systems across the KTH Royal Institute of Technology campus and we identify some possible areas where energy consumption can be made less wasteful. Later, we describe a test-bed where wireless sensor networks are used to collect data and eventually control the HVAC system in a distributed way. We present some of the data, temperature, humidity, and CO₂ measurements, that are collected by the aforementioned network and compare them with the measurements collected by the legacy sensors already in place. In the end we present a preliminary result on modelling the dynamics of the temperature, humidity, and CO₂ using the data gather by the sensor network. We check the validity of the model via comparing the out put of the system with measured data. As a future work we identify the possibility of using the models obtained here for model based control, and fault detection and isolation techniques.