The Building Research Establishment (BRE) is a centre of building science in the United Kingdom, owned by a charitable organisation, the BRE Trust. BRE provides research, advice, training, testing, certification and standards for public and private sector organisations in the UK and abroad.
Adaptive Mobile Sensing within Buildings
Low Cost Adaptive Mobile Sensing within Buildings towards Augmenting Smart Buildings
Nowadays, people spend most of their time in indoor environments. The indoor environment has become a key factor in people’s health and productivity. At the same time, smart building systems have emerged and are playing a role in building management to improve the health and productivity of occupants. Sensors are placed in the building to collect data to generate insights. Smart building systems use AI to understand the occupants’ habits from the data and use actuators to improve occupant experience and overall building efficiency. There are several sub-systems in the smart building system, for example, the air quality system, the lighting system, the thermal comfort system, and the HVAC system (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning). Depending on the size and use of the building, the number of different sub-systems and sensors varies. The number of sensors and the way they are placed becomes a challenge. A large number of sensors need to be deployed throughout the building to generate useful results and insights. Such deployments, especially if retrofitting, would lead to increased deployment costs/effort/time and maintenance costs.
This project aims to design a smart building system for an existing building that reduces the complexity and consumption of the system without compromising accuracy and functionality by using mobile sensors instead of static sensors. The system has four sub-systems, an air quality system, a lighting system, a thermal system, and an activity recognition system. There is an additional control centre to integrate the various systems and make them interoperable. The activity recognition system is also the only subsystem that collects human data. It will detect the number of people in the design area and send it to the control centre. Except for the activity recognition system, all other systems collect environmental data. The main objectives of this project are:
- Conduct a literature review of autonomous/mobile systems used in smart building systems and smart environments and classify and compare their utility, characteristics, and capabilities.
- Design a mobile sensor system based on IoT technology to reduce the number of sensors used in a smart building system and try to achieve equal or (close enough results).
- Evaluate the performance of the mobile sensors system and examine the trade-offs between static/stationary sensor systems and hybrid systems in the context of various anomaly detection tasks (e.g., violation of sustainability standards, comfort and wellbeing preferences, etc.)
Team
Partners
Building Research Establishment (BRE)