Real-Time Monitoring of Building Energy Metering Networks

Abstract

Energy Management Systems (EMSs) are used to monitor energy consumption in buildings with the purpose of improving energy efficiency, by identifying savings opportunities and misuse situations. To achieve that, an EMS collects energy metering data streams from a network of energy meters in the building. Sensor data must be processed in (near) real-time, to support a timely decision making process. Currently, EMSs are using traditional DBMSs to process such data, introducing a persistence step that translates to an unacceptable latency on data evaluation. Moreover, sensor data monitoring queries are not elegantly supported by the SQL query language, thus hampering the ability of an EMS to process energy metering data in realtime. Data Stream Management Systems (DSMSs) are used to process data streams efficiently in several domains. Many sensor network monitoring applications have been implemented upon DSMSs resulting in significant improvements on performance and overall resource usage. This work validates the hypothesis proposed in [1] that, to process energy metering data streams in realtime, EMSs should be supported by DSMSs, instead of DBMSs. We introduce an EMS’s Data Processing Architecture supported by a DSMS that supports the implementation of an EMS capable of performing real-time data processing. We validate our solution through a benchmark evaluation against a DBMS based architecture. The results clearly show that the DSMSbased EMS outperformed the state of the art approach, both in data evaluation latency and query language expressibility— demonstrating its adequacy to process energy metering data streams in real-time.