Abstract
Building operating systems play an important role in monitoring energy consumption of devices and improving energy efficiency in household buildings. From this arises a need for a preferably flexible and full-featured user interface to visualize the energy data in the building and allow residents to collect and realize various needs and preferences to the system. This article introduces a generic user interface for building operating systems which is presented from aspects of design, implementation and evaluation. To ensure the user interface can be flexibly adapted to various types of buildings, we design a series of generic data models which are independent of any building operating system. Besides, three roles with different permissions and a number of functional components of the user interface are also introduced in the article. Based on the design, a prototype of such a generic user interface named Building Operating System User Interface (BOS UI) has been implemented to operate the Energy Smart Home Lab (ESHL) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). We evaluate the design, functionality and usability of the BOS UI qualitatively and quantitatively. The evaluation results show that the BOS UI meets a set of desired requirements (except for system configuration) for a generic user interface of building operating systems. Besides this, the evaluation experiments yielded very positive feedback in many aspects including improvement of energy efficiency and user experience. More than 90% of the test users agreed that the BOS UI provided them with enough information and functionalities that they would need in their daily lives and it can help them to save money. Furthermore, the mean score of the System Usability Scale (SUS) is 79.0, which indicates a good usability. The experiments prove that the user interface is still easy to use, despite abundant features are integrated into the system.
Highlights
Nowadays improving energy efficiency has become a global concern in terms of saving natural resources and cutting down on pollution
The usability evaluation of the Building Operating System User Interface (BOS UI) is done in a way of conducting experiments by inviting participants to complete pre-determined tasks and asking the participants to fill out questionnaires about the user interface
In order to have a more objective evaluation of this user interface, in addition to a qualitative analysis, this article provided a quantitative evaluation to the functionalities as well as the usability of the BOS UI by inviting a group of test users to perform a number of pre-determined tasks, and asking the test users to fill out questionnaires
Summary
Nowadays improving energy efficiency has become a global concern in terms of saving natural resources and cutting down on pollution. During the last two decades (1984-2004) primary energy consumption has grown by 49% and CO2 emissions by 43%, with an average annual increase of 2 and 1.8% respectively (Pérez-Lombard et al 2008). Energy use in buildings represents about 40% of the EU’s total final energy consumption and CO2 emissions (Balaras et al 2007), improving energy efficiency and making best use of renewable energies in buildings will play a significant role in mitigating the global energy (2018) 1:55 and climate crisis. The Organic Smart Home (OSH) (Allerding and Schmeck 2011) helps to optimizes the schedule of appliances based on evolutionary algorithms in order to help residents to save money. In Mauser et al (2016), the OSH has been extended to support multi-commodity energy management in smart homes
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