Smart Buildings Research Articles

Mathematical Modeling of Multi-Physics Phenomena in Smart Materials and Structures

Smart materials and buildings show interesting multi-physics effects, where the interaction of different physical fields like mechanics, electromagnetics, thermodynamics, and sound is very important. This essay gives an in-depth look at different mathematical modeling methods used to understand and predict how smart materials and buildings will behave in various situations. At its core, the modeling framework combines guiding equations from various physical fields. This calls for a comprehensive method that takes into account how these events interact with each other in complex ways. The basis is mechanics, which includes fundamental equations that show how materials react to mechanical forces, including elasticity, viscoelasticity, and flexibility. Electromagnetic effects are very important in materials like magnetostrictives and piezoelectrics, where the way electrical and mechanical fields combine determines how they work. To correctly describe this electrical connection, Maxwell's equations are linked to mechanical equations. This lets devices like sensors, motors, and energy harvesters be designed and improved. Thermodynamics is used for shape memory metals and phase change materials, whose behavior is controlled by changes in temperature. Adding heat transfer equations to mechanical and electromagnetic equations helps us fully understand how these materials interact with heat, motion, and electricity, which is important for many uses, from medical devices to spacecraft structures. Structures with active shaking control systems that use piezoelectric materials have interesting acoustic effects. With the help of mechanical and electrical algorithms and acoustic wave transmission models, it is possible to study and create smart structures that can reduce noise and shocks while also improving their performance and integrity. The study also talks about numerical methods, like finite element methods and multiphysics modeling tools, that can be used to quickly solve the linked equations. These tools help us learn more about how complicated materials behave in various working situations.

Advancing Sustainability: Paper for Enhancing Eco-Friendly Methodology in the Shanghai Tower

This proposal aims to enhance the eco-friendly methods of the Shanghai Tower, a prominent building in Shanghai, by implementing additional sustainable practices. The building already incorporates various environmental friendly technologies, such as vertical green vegetation, intelligent building skin, natural ventilation, passive solar heating, and more. This proposal suggests further enhancements, including optimization natural lighting, rainwater collection, ice-need cold technology, on-site renewable energy utilization, and intelligent control systems. By implementing these measures, the Shanghai Tower can emerge as a pioneering model for other buildings, making significant contributions to environmental preservation, energy efficiency, and sustainable development in the region.

Ontology-Based Data Representation Prototype for Indoor Air Quality, Building Energy Performance, and Health Data Computation

This study investigates the data integration of IoT-enabled sensor networks, emphasizing energy performance and personalized indoor air quality (IAQ) solutions to improve indoor environments, energy efficiency, and sustainability. Ontologies—structured frameworks that standardize data representation and enable interoperability—are the tools for interpreting complex IAQ data for optimal energy rate plans and health situations. Our methodology follows the well-established three-phase engineering approach. We present the design of a prototype with essential classes, which is proposed to integrate IAQ data with health conditions, enhancing real-time monitoring and automated decision making for optimal energy performance for smart buildings. Our research goal is to define the most essential classes, arranging them hierarchically to create a prototype for data computing covering IAQ, energy performance, and health aspects. This ontological framework, covering all three aspects, addresses a current research gap. Results demonstrate the minimum viable product with 78 classes for a smart home IoT system, providing tailored indoor climate control based on user health profiles and energy performance. This prototype represents a significant advancement in sustainable building and IAQ management, promising improved building energy performance, occupant health, and comfort. Future research will validate this framework through extensive testing in real-world environments.

Application of energy combined thermal comfort in intelligent building management in complex environments

The efficient operation of heating ventilation and air conditioning systems relies on advanced control strategies. However, current control methods are often limited by issues such as uncertain system parameter information and spatial coupling constraints related to the supply rate of the air supply fan. To this end, an energy joint thermal comfort management method for complex environments in multiple regions is proposed. The long-term total cost minimization of the system is established, and then the Lyapunov optimization technology is used to design the distributed control algorithm. Simulation validation shows that the proposed method reduces the energy cost by an average of 11.24% compared to other methods with a thermal discomfort cost coefficient of 0. The average temperature deviation in the area is improved by 0.15 °C and 0.68 °C, respectively. The method saves more than 10% of the total energy cost under different thermal perturbations with an average total temperature deviation of 0.04 °C. The results indicate that the proposed energy joint thermal comfort management method can flexibly balance energy costs and user thermal comfort without knowing any prior information of system parameters, which can also greatly protect user privacy information. This method has application value in the control of heating ventilation and air conditioning systems in complex environments such as commercial buildings.

Perceptions of built environment professionals on intelligent office buildings: The interplay between technology, design for sustainability and responsiveness

The confluence of technological advances, climate mitigation efforts, and evolving user expectations has significantly transformed how the built environment is conceptualized, designed, and delivered; Intelligent Buildings (IBs) are not an exception. The systematic literature review revealed that there have been limited studies exploring the perspectives of Building Environment (BE) professionals on IBs, along with divergent emerging descriptions of IBs, creating an ambiguity for their practical realization. To address this gap, this study aims to explore the intelligence in office buildings based on professionals’ interpretations and its practical implementation through design features. An exploratory study was carried out by conducting semi-structured interviews with 63 domain professionals, and qualitative content analysis was utilized to identify emerging themes during the interviews. Nine themes were identified for describing Intelligent Office Buildings (IOBs). Professionals' perceptions were found to vary according to their nationality and profession. The original contribution of this study is that by reflecting the perspectives of building environment professionals worldwide through interviews and revisiting the existing debates in the literature, the current IOB design approach is delineated. The core IOB concept evolves around the occupant-oriented approach and the integration of climate-responsive design strategies with a balanced level of technology uniquely serving a well-defined purpose by taking advantage of regional conditions. Research findings have theoretical contributions by unravelling the IOB concept and design features, shedding light on the dual roles of technology and design principles. These findings on guiding principles for the design of IOBs can provide a valuable framework for BE practitioners.

Innovative ICT in Smart Buildings Domain: A Pantentometric Analysis

Background: “Smart Building” constructed using “Smart Materials” for “Smart People” and to create or build “Smart Societies or Cities” is the new trend all over the world. Introduction: To implement smartness holistically, it is essential to surf through databases where innovations from all over the world are visible or can be retrieved. A "One stop solution" to locate innovations from specific domains is patent databases and hence this paper showcases the current scenario of civil constructions using AI-ML or alike technologies. Method: Relecura database is primarily used for performing analysis of all the patents related to these two collaborative domains. A special focus is given to the analysis of data from 2015-2021, to know the latest trends in technology used for constructing smart buildings. Result: Smart home, sensors, and machine learning are highly found keywords. China is the leading country for patents in the smart building domain. The use of computational models and pictorial communication can be explored to increase the patentability of the innovation. Conclusion: This patent analysis will be useful to the end readers, researchers, and students to understand the innovative concepts implemented so far and in turn understand the possible research gaps in these collaborative domains.

Physical Side-Channel Attacks against Intermittent Devices

Intermittent (batteryless) devices operate solely using energy harvested from their environment. These devices turn on when they have energy and turn off during energy scarcity. Intermittent devices have recently become increasingly popular in smart buildings, manufacturing plants, and medical implantables as they eliminate the need for battery replacement and enable green computing. Despite their growing adoption in critical applications, the privacy implications of intermittent devices remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a novel remote side-channel attack. Our observation is that the network packet frequency of an intermittent device can be exploited to learn its turn-on/off patterns. From these patterns, we can infer the energy availability of a device, which reveals privacy-sensitive information about its operating environment, e.g., the presence or absence of individuals. To realize our attack, we develop a three-stage hierarchical inference framework that leverages the timestamped network packet sequence of intermittent devices. Our framework automatically extracts a set of temporal features from inter-packet-arrival timings. It then employs a series of models to uncover (1) whether a target intermittent device is present in the environment, (2) its energy harvester type (e.g., vibration or water flow), and (3) its energy availability conditions (e.g., high-vibration or no-vibration). To validate our attack effectiveness, we conduct experiments in two environments: a smart home and a miniature manufacturing plant equipped with three intermittent devices powered by solar energy, vibration, and temperature. By analyzing their energy availability patterns, we are able to infer user activities and presence in the smart home and the robot’s movement patterns in the manufacturing plant with an average accuracy of 85%. This sensitive information enables an adversary to launch domain-specific attacks, such as burglarizing a smart home when the user is asleep or timely tampering with plant sensors to cause maximum damage.

Attention-Based Deep Learning Approach for Nonintrusive and Simultaneous State Detection of Multiple Appliances in Smart Buildings

Attention-Based Deep Learning Approach for Nonintrusive and Simultaneous State Detection of Multiple Appliances in Smart Buildings

Optimization of the PVT performance with various orientations of jets and MFFNN-RSA prediction model for smart buildings

The combined thermal and photovoltaic technology in PV/T systems is considered as a greatly promising technology for smart buildings. Thus, investigations for enhancing the PV/T performance are still proceeding. This research presents an investigation for novel configurations of cooling jets for the PVT system. The linear and circular distribution for the inlet jets considering regular and irregular positioning for all the jets as new cooling configurations are implemented. Moreover, the proposed geometrical configurations are optemized regarding the performance to identify the most suitable configuration that achieves the optimum efficiency and temperature. Furthermore, a novel hybrid ANN model is presented for predicting the performance of the PVT systems. This model combines the multi-feedforward neural network (MFFNN) with an optimization technique called reptile search algorithm (RSA). The proposed model can process the studied parameters to predict the PVT performance parameters (top surface temperature, temperature un-uniformity, outlet temperature, and efficiencies). The proposed MFFNN-RSA model minimized the mean square error to less than 0.4857×10-3. The maximum temperature decrease achieved by the presented configuration reached 60.62K compared to the uncooled case, while the minimum temperature un-uniformity reached 1K and 6K for 400 and 1000 W/m2, respectively. The increase of the ambient temperature found to decrease the temperature un-uniformity in all the cases. The irregular jet with the linear distribution was found to achieve the optimum performance of the overall, thermal, and electrical efficiencies of 63.5%, 49.6%, and 14.25%, respectively. Furthermore, the electricity production cost was reduced by 11.6%, and the yearly CO2 emissions were reduced by 215.3 kg/m2 compared to the normal PV system. The proposed irregular-line distribution of the jets is found to be the best configuration regarding the temperature of the PV model and the overall efficiency considering the pumping losses.

Design and Simulation Implementation of Indoor Lighting Integrated Control System Based on Fuzzy Control

Abstract With the improvement of people’s living standards, higher requirements have been put forward for the quality of the living environment. The progress of science and technology has provided the possibility for the further development of intelligent buildings. As an important component of intelligent buildings, the intelligence level of intelligent lighting is relatively fall behind, especially energy-saving and comprehensive linkage are not considered in the scope of intelligent lighting. According to the characteristics of indoor environment control variables and controlled variables, this paper uses fuzzy control method to realize the comprehensive control of indoor lighting, summarizes the corresponding measures taken by experience into control rules, and constructs a controller to control the complex lighting process instead of people. Through the construction of control rules, the natural lighting is constrained under the full consideration of the influence of temperature and ventilation. The purpose of giving priority to the use of natural lighting and taking into account the overall energy optimization of the system is achieved. The energy-saving idea of combining lighting control with other systems of intelligent building is proposed, and the system performance is simulated and analyzed. It has the advantages of high integration, high degree of intelligence, energy saving and convenient use.

Forecasting operation of a chiller plant facility using data-driven models

In recent years, data-driven models have enabled accurate prediction of chiller power consumption and chiller coefficient of performance (COP). This study evaluates the usage of time series Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models to predict chiller power consumption and chiller COP of a water-cooled chiller plant. The 10-second measured data used in this study are from the Intelligent Building Agents Laboratory (IBAL), which includes two water-cooled chillers. Preprocessing, data selection, noise analysis, and data smoothing methods influence the accuracy of these data-driven predictions. The data intervals were changed to 30 s, 60 s, and 180 s using down-sampling and averaging strategies to investigate the impact of data preprocessing methods and data resolutions on the accuracy of chiller COP and power consumption models. To overcome the effect of noise on the accuracy of the models of chiller power consumption and COP, two data smoothing methods, the moving average window strategy and the Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter, are applied. The results show that both methods improve the predictions compared to the baseline, with the SG filter slightly outperforming the moving average. Particularly, the mean absolute percentage error of the chiller COP and power consumption models improved from 4.8 to 4.9 for the baseline to 1.9 and 2.3 with the SG filter, respectively. Overall, this study provides a practical guide to developing XGBoost data-driven chiller power consumption and COP prediction models.

Benefits of a Smart Building Design in Public Library Facilities, Lagos State, Nigeria

The study refers to the benefits in the adoption of a smart building design in public library facilities, Lagos State, Nigeria. Public libraries in Lagos serve as vital resources for education, information, and community activities. However, challenges such as outdated infrastructure, limited financial resources and varying levels of technological literacy among the community need to be addressed to ensure successful integration. The study examined the practicality, benefits, challenges, costs associated with integrating smart technologies and infrastructure such as smart lighting, heating, ventilation, air conditioning systems, occupancy sensors, energy management systems etc. The research methodology present in this study was sampling technique and sampling procedure, sampling frame, instrument for data collection, and data analysis techniques. The study discussed public library facilities, the criteria for categorization smart buildings, basic smart devices needed in public library buildings, problems and solutions identified with public library buildings in Lagos. The findings of this study indicated that introducing smart building design for a public library facility offers several notable benefits which include significant energy savings, improved indoor environmental quality, enhanced user experience through personalized services, and efficient space utilization. Moreover, smart building features enable real-time monitoring and data analytics for informed decision-making and maintenance. However, the challenges that needs to be addressed during the assessment process include high upfront costs, interoperability and data security concerns, potential disruptions during the transition phase, and the need of training staff to utilize the new technologies effectively. Overall, with careful planning, stakeholder involvement, and appropriate fundings, the library can embrace smart technologies to enhance its operational efficiency, user experience, sustainability, and contribute positively to the surrounding community.

Smart buildings and sustainable design: Leveraging AI for energy optimization in the built environment

Smart buildings and sustainable design: Leveraging AI for energy optimization in the built environment

The Development of Smart Cities and Intelligent Buildings

The Development of Smart Cities and Intelligent Buildings

MPC-based robust optimization of smart apartment building considering uncertainty for conservative reduction

Undergoing a significant transition is demand-side management (DSM), brought about by changes in the energy landscape, including the extensive deployment of renewable energy sources (RES). One of the most important challenges in DSM is dealing with uncertainty. Robust optimization methods are widely known as an approach to deal with uncertainty. However, this method tends to be conservative in its solution because it considers worst-case scenarios. In this study, we develop a robust approach of model predictive control (MPC) to reduce conservativeness and maintain robustness in DSM of smart apartment building (SAB). Consisting of two stages is the robust optimization strategy employed in this study. The first stage involves day-ahead scheduling, where four different optimization approaches are implemented. In the second stage, intra-day scheduling is implemented on the basis of day-ahead operational plan. The application of this technique achieves reduced conservativeness and maintains robustness. The simulation results show that by using the proposed approach, compared to conventional robust optimization, while maintaining robustness, the operation cost of day-ahead scheduling can be reduced by 10.79% and the operation cost of intra-day scheduling can be reduced by 15%.

Revolutionizing indoor air quality monitoring through IoT innovations: a comprehensive systematic review and bibliometric analysis.

Indoor air quality (IAQ) in the built environment is significantly influenced by particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, and air temperature. Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been integrated to improve IAQ and safeguard human health, comfort, and productivity. This review seeks to highlight the potential of IoT integration for monitoring IAQ. Additionally, the paper details progress by researchers in developing IoT/mobile applications for IAQ monitoring, and their transformative impact in smart building, healthcare, predictive maintenance, and real-time data analysis systems. It also outlines the persistent challenges (e.g., data privacy, security, and user acceptability), hampering effective IoT implementation for IAQ monitoring. Lastly, the global developments and research landscape on IoT for IAQ monitoring were examined through bibliometric analysis (BA) of 106 publications indexed in Web of Science from 2015 to 2022. BA revealed the most significant contributing countries are India and Portugal, while the top productive institutions and researchers are Instituto Politecnico da Guarda (10.37% of TP) and Marques Goncalo (15.09% of TP), respectively. Keyword analysis revealed four major research themes: IoT, pollution, monitoring, and health. Overall, this paper provides significant insights for identifying prospective collaborators, benchmark publications, strategic funding, and institutions for future IoT-IAQ researchers.

Building Information Modeling and Digital Twins for Functional and Technical Design of Smart Buildings with Distributed IoT Networks—Review and New Challenges Discussion

Building Information Modeling and Digital Twins for Functional and Technical Design of Smart Buildings with Distributed IoT Networks—Review and New Challenges Discussion

Taking Shenzhen and Shanghai as Examples to Analyze the Construction and Development of Smart Port Cities

In recent years, the enthusiasm for discussing building smart cities has been boosted greatly worldwide, and the residents of major super cities seem to be eager to understand what a smart city is. Unfortunately, due to the International Business Machines Corporations (IBM) recent introduction of the concept of smart cities, many people have misunderstood the concept of smart cities, and even mistakenly classify urban digitization as the scope of smart cities. The core element of a smart city is to use various Smart City Facilities (geographic information systems, urban security systems, intelligent traffic control systems, environmental monitoring systems, residents feedback systems) to bring the city onto an intelligent, automated, efficient, and livable road. This article aims to compare two significant Chinese port cities, Shenzhen and Shanghai, in their efforts to establish smart cities. It delves into the challenges they encountered during this process, analyzes the benefits accrued, and offers valuable reminding for cities aspiring to embark on their own smart city journey in the future.

Intelligent Buildings and Their Use in Aerospace Industry

The article discusses about intelligent buildings in aviation industry. In the introduction the term of intelligent buildings for basic understanding of the issues is defined. The definition of intelligent building can be different by/ based on a lot of criteria. For that purpose, the first part contains fundamental concepts of definition. The aviation industry is considered to be one of the first which uses knowledge and innovative solutions. Currently, the most frequently solved issues are relating to the need for security, increasing energy prices and the increasing environmental awareness. Next part gives essential information about airports around the world which are among the first of all in the concept of green energy. The last part is the most important part for the fulfilment of the main aim of the research. This section contains the current technological options available at airports and their applicability under current conditions. The aim is the analysis of the energy performance of buildings at the airport and the suggestion of relevant opportunities for saving electricity. Suggestions are listed for improving energy intensity also with specific advantages and disadvantages.

Enriching Real-Estate Through Sustainable Public Spaces: The case of Dubai- UAE

In the process of the ongoing urban planning strategies for developing smart cities, the concept of urban public square has not yet been given the attention of urbanists and city planners in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. More focus was given by architects and developers on saturating the market with iconic smart buildings rather than developing more livable communities with public spaces and plazas for people to connect. The overall aim of this paper is to highlight the key role that the real state sector can play to foster developing public spaces and squares as an integral part of smart urbanism. The issue of developing urban public squares in Dubai new communities and formulating policies for including such spaces in new districts and cities should be closely examined. The focus should be on enriching the real estate sector by regulating a concept of injecting urban public squares in the new smart and sustainable urbanism in Dubai to perform as a sociocultural entity within the fabric of new communities for the sake of improving social life and developing vibrant environment. With keywords such as smart city, public squares, social, urban design, livability; and sustainability, this write up makes the case of sustainable urbanization.