Summary
An Integrated Mobile Sensor System For Occupancy And Behavior Driven Building Energy Management
Growing energy demand in recent years is becoming an issue of national urgency. Currently, buildings and their occupants are responsible for nearly half the energy consumed in the U.S. However, designing, managing and retrofitting "green" buildings are difficult tasks because buildings are complex and unique systems that are heavily influenced by building operations, human preferences and activities. Facility managers and building owners are constantly striving to find ways to decrease the energy consumption of their buildings. One issue is that buildings are currently operated under generalized assumptions, such as operating for the peak occupancy load as opposed to the optimal. Occupant comfort is a dominant influence on facility operations, but without any direct feedback other than infrequent complaints, the facility manager is forced to 'play it safe,' resulting in sub-optimal operations. To address these issues, we
are proposing a heterogeneous in-building networked sensor and control system, which integrates building occupancy information, human activities and subjective preferences with objective amb ient sensor measurements and building energy management systems to optimize energy usage while maintaining human comfort.
In service of this overarching goal, there are specific research goals that this proposal sets out to achieve:
(1) to develop a networked sensor system (consisting of mobile smart phones, wireless sensor nodes, and the building management systems) that not only detects how many occupants there are in a zone but also identifies occupants, their activities, preferences, in addition to ambient climate measurements; (2) to
fuse objective and subjective data collected from various sources using specialized sensor fusion and machine learning techniques; (3) to investigate and develop online stochastic optimization algorithms to minimize the building energy consumption while maximizing occupant comfort; and (4) establish a
framework where humans and building systems interact ubiquitously in real time through our integrated sensor and control system for energy awareness and learning. We will validate our ideas on a unique
real building test bed at USC. The proposed work is innovative and impactful because the sensor system and algorithmic methods we develop in this project have the potential to change how buildings are engineered, built, retrofitted and operated.
The intellectual merit of the proposal is the development and validation of an integrated networked sensor system and a framework for optimizing building energy use while maximizing occupant comfort.
The resulting system and optimization framework will allow for the development of new models about the trends and patterns of occupancy and energy use. Our research spans multiple disciplines of engineering (civil, environmental and electrical engineering) as well as computer science. It encompasses
challenges in the physical domain, such as understanding the relationships between energy consumption, human comfort and behavior, as well as challenges in the cyber domain such as implementing efficient sensing and localization algorithms on mobile devices, networking low power wireless embedded nodes, sensor-fusion and machine learning techniques for performing inferences about actual ambient measurements, occupancy loads and occupant comfort, discovering knowledge in datasets of energy consumption, and optimizing the building controls based on stochastic feedback.
When considering the increasing energy needs of our country and world, the broader impact of this proposal on environmental conservation, pollution, and the economy is potentially far-reaching. This research can provide a foundation for a series of future systems and approaches that will help reduce the
energy consumption of buildings in the U.S. and the rest of the world. The results will be disseminated through and contribute to: the EE/CS and CEE curriculums, multiple conference talks, publications, and public outreach via an energy education program for use in K-12 classrooms; the Sustainability Program at USC. We plan to develop an interactive game, in which K-12 students will use our proxies to compete to save the most energy in virtual 3D representations of their buildings. This 'learning by gaming' will teach them how they can conserve energy in their daily life by modifying their behavior and habits.