Smart Buildings
In the building sector, there is a trend towards “smart buildings” and the installation of sensors to gain a better insight into energy consumption data to raise user awareness, increase comfort and improve control performance and efficiency. A reduction in the number of sensors would reduce costs and maintenance and facilitate a large-scale roll-out of sensor networks to existing buildings. This contributes to the reduction of energy demand and corresponding CO2 emissions.
Equipping buildings with sensor networks to optimize energy use is becoming popular, but the cost and maintenance of hardware sensors is limiting widespread adoption.
We explore using "soft sensors" - software that estimates sensor data, requiring less hardware. Soft sensors would be automatically created using advanced methods to model building energy performance.
The concept will be demonstrated in 15 buildings at the research campus of FZ-Juelich. These already contain wireless sensor networks in 250 rooms monitoring energy use and comfort parameters.
The goal is to show that a fraction of the physical sensors can be replaced by soft sensor estimates without losing critical functionality. This could enable large-scale smart building sensor network roll-outs at lower cost.
In turn, this will allow better energy efficiency across more buildings, contributing to lower emissions. Building owners get energy insights without the full sensor hardware burden.