Context-Aware Wireless Sensor Networks for Smart Building Energy Management System

Najem Naji,Nissrine Krami,Driss Benhaddou,Mohamed Riduan Abid

doi:10.3390/info11110530

Najem Naji, Nissrine Krami + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/info11110530

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Abstract

Energy Management Systems (EMS) are indispensable for Smart Energy-Efficient Buildings (SEEB). This paper proposes a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)-based EMS deployed and tested in a real-world smart building on a university campus. The at-scale implementation enabled the deployment of a WSN mesh topology to evaluate performance in terms of routing capabilities, data collection, and throughput. The proposed EMS uses the Context-Based Reasoning (CBR) Model to represent different types of buildings and offices. We implemented a new energy-efficient policy for electrical heaters control based on a Finite State Machine (FSM) leveraging on context-related events. This demonstrated significant effectiveness in minimizing the processing load, especially when adopting multithreading in data acquisition and control. To optimize sensors’ battery lifetime, we deployed a new Energy Aware Context Recognition Algorithm (EACRA) that dynamically configures sensors to send data under specific conditions and at particular times to avoid redundant data transmissions. EACRA increases the sensors’ battery lifetime by optimizing the number of samples, used modules, and transmissions. Our proposed EMS design can be used as a model to retrofit other kinds of buildings, such as residential and industrial, and thus converting them to SEEBs.

Highlights

The use of traditional energy resources such as natural gas, petroleum, and coal results in a huge amount of greenhouse gas emission (GHE) such as carbon dioxide—CO2 [1]
In order to improve energy efficiency and lower the electricity bill, we propose the development of a smart Energy Management Systems (EMS) system to control these electrical headers using information and communication technologies (ICTs), the development of an energy-efficient control framework that can reduce energy consumption in buildings using ICT
To develop the EMS, we investigated the existing energy consumption of a given building, energy policy, and optimization techniques used by the energy department

Summary

Introduction

The use of traditional energy resources such as natural gas, petroleum, and coal results in a huge amount of greenhouse gas emission (GHE) such as carbon dioxide—CO2 [1]. Across the different fields of science, researchers worldwide are making great efforts to minimize the usage of these traditional energy sources. These efforts involve various research topics related to energy generation, energy transmission, smart distribution, energy consumption, and energy storage. Computer scientists are developing intelligent systems for energy management in Smart Grids (SG) [2]. There is a need to promote renewable energy and optimize energy consumption at endpoints [3]

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