Implementation of a building automation system based on semantic modeling

This paper presents an Ontology-Based multi-technology platform designed to avoid some issues of Building Automation Systems. The platform allows the integration of several building automation protocols, eases the development and implementation of different kinds of services and allows sharing information related to the infrastructure and facilities within a building. The system has been implemented and tested in the Energy Efficiency Research Facility at CeDInt-UPM.

Open multi-technology building energy management system

Energy Efficiency is one of the goals of the Smart Building initiatives. This paper presents an Open Energy Management System which consists of an ontology-based multi-technology platform and a wireless transducer network using 6LoWPAN communication technology. The system allows the integration of several building automation protocols and eases the development of different kind of services to make use of them. The system has been implemented and tested in the Energy Efficiency Research Facility at CeDInt-UPM.

Bat-MP: An Ontology-Based Energy Management Platform

This paper presents an Ontology-Based multi-technology platform as part of an open energy management system which also comprises a wireless transducer network for control and monitoring. The platform allows the integration of several building automation protocols, eases the development and implementation of different kinds of services and allows sharing of the data of a building. The system has been implemented and tested in the Energy Efficiency Research Facility at CeDInt-UPM.

Multiprotocol Android Application for Smart Control and Monitoring in Buildings

This paper presents a multiprotocol mobile application for building automation which supports and enables the integration of the most representative control technologies such as KNX, LonWorks and X-10. The application includes a real-time monitoring service. Finally, advanced control functionalities based on gestures recognition and predefined scenes have been implemented. This application has been developed and tested in the Energy Efficiency Research Facility located at CeDInt-UPM, where electrical loads, blinds and HVAC and lighting systems can be controlled.

Background and approach to a definition of smart buildings

There is no doubt that there is no possibility of finding a single reference about domotics in the first half of the 20th century. The best known authors and those who have documented this discipline, set its origin in the 1970’s, when the x-10 technology began to be used, but it was not until 1988 when Larousse Encyclopedia decided to include the definition of "Smart Building". Furthermore, even nowadays, there is not a single definition widely accepted, and for that reason, many other expressions, namely "Intelligent Buildings" "Domotics" "Digital Home" or "Home Automation" have appeared to describe the automated buildings and homes. The lack of a clear definition for "Smart Buildings" causes difficulty not only in the development of a common international framework to develop research in this field, but it also causes insecurity in the potential user of these buildings. That is to say, the user does not know what is offered by this kind of buildings, hindering the dissemination of the culture of building automation in society. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to propose a definition of the expression “Smart Buildings” that satisfactorily describes the meaning of this discipline. To achieve this aim, a thorough review of the origin of the term itself and the historical background before the emergence of the phenomenon of domotics was conducted, followed by a critical discussion of existing definitions of the term "Smart Buildings" and other similar terms. The extent of each definition has been analyzed, inaccuracies have been discarded and commonalities have been compared. Throughout the discussion, definitions that bring the term "Smart Buildings" near to disciplines such as computer science, robotics and also telecommunications have been found. However, there are also many other definitions that emphasize in a more abstract way the role of these new buildings in the society and the future of mankind.

Home automation controller for a water-flow window

Facing the EU energy efficiency and legal scenarios related to buildings (2010/31 EU directive), new sustainable advanced concepts for envelopes are required. These innovative designs must be able to offer an elevated level of energy efficiency based on a high performance architecture. According to this, smart glazings, and particularly active water-flow glazings, represent a promising alternative to other solar control glazings, since they can reduce the building energy demand avoiding well known drawbacks as high cost, glare problems and high response time that affect to other smart glazings. This kind of glazing, as any other active one, needs to be operated by a control system. In order to operate a water-flow based window, a new controller based on an inexpensive microcontroller board has been developed

Determination of the influence of specific building regulations in smart buildings

The automation of domestic services began to be implemented in buildings since the late nineteenth century, and today we are used to terms like ‘intelligent buildings’, ‘digital home’ or ‘domotic buildings’. These concepts tell us about constructions which integrate new technologies in order to improve comfort, optimize energy consumption or enhance the security of users. In conjunction, building regulations have been updated to suit the needs of society and to regulate these new facilities in such structures. However, we are not always sure about how far, from the quantitative or qualitative point of view, legislation should regulate certain aspects of the building activity. Consequently, content analysis is adopted in this research to determine the influence of building regulations in the implementation of new technologies in the construction process. This study includes the analysis of different European regulations, the collection and documentation of such guidelines that have been established and a study of the impact that all of these have had in the way we start thinking an architectural project. The achievements of the research could be explained in terms of the regulatory requirements that must be taken into account in order to achieve a successful implementation of a home automation system, and the key finding has been the confirmation of how the design of smart buildings may be promoted through specific regulatory requirements while other factors, such as the global economic situation, do not seem to affect directly the rate of penetration of home automation in construction.

Guidelines for Linked Data generation and publication: an example in building energy consumption

Linked Data is the key paradigm of the Semantic Web, a new generation of the World Wide Web that promises to bring meaning (semantics) to data. A large number of both public and private organizations have published their data following the Linked Data principles, or have done so with data from other organizations. To this extent, since the generation and publication of Linked Data are intensive engineering processes that require high attention in order to achieve high quality, and since experience has shown that existing general guidelines are not always sufficient to be applied to every domain, this paper presents a set of guidelines for generating and publishing Linked Data in the context of energy consumption in buildings (one aspect of Building Information Models). These guidelines offer a comprehensive description of the tasks to perform, including a list of steps, tools that help in achieving the task, various alternatives for performing the task, and best practices and recommendations. Furthermore, this paper presents a complete example on the generation and publication of Linked Data about energy consumption in buildings, following the presented guidelines, in which the energy consumption data of council sites (e.g., buildings and lights) belonging to the Leeds City Council jurisdiction have been generated and published as Linked Data.