Room Systems as a Service Platform for Smart Buildings

Smart buildings refers to the capability of a building to sense, interpret, communicate and to respond to changing conditions, which are introduced by requirements of occupants to indoor climate,  operation of technical... [ view full abstract ]

Smart buildings refers to the capability of a building to sense, interpret, communicate and to respond to changing conditions, which are introduced by requirements of occupants to indoor climate,  operation of technical building systems and demands of intelligent energy systems. Possibility to adapt in response to the perception of the occupants and further empower end-users makes possible to enhance users’ satisfaction to indoor climate. Readiness to facilitate maintenance and efficient operation of technical building systems guarantees optimal performance of systems. In smart buildings, this should happen cost and environmentally efficient way by adapting in response to the smart energy grid.  All this requires paradigm shift in commercial buildings where passive users are amended to be prosumers. The objective of the paper is to introduce a concept for smart meeting rooms of educational buildings to monitor energy efficiency, indoor climate conditions and system performance. In the concepts, users may provide the mutually agreed room air temperature and boost ventilation with their mobile apps interfaces.

In meeting rooms of educational buildings, water radiator heating system with thermostat and variable air volume systems are commonly used in Nordic countries. The air flow rate control is typically based on occupancy sensor that boost ventilation if the spaces are occupied.  The control of building technical system is centralized and users are not able to control their indoor climate. The problem is, in addition to the previous system, that the standard system is not able to rapidly react for dynamic energy tariffs of intelligent energy systems.

In the cutting edge solution, the water radiators are equipped with IoT thermostats that makes possible to introduce demand-response in heating system. The performance of VAV is monitored with separated IoT sensors of pressure difference over building envelope that indicates the possible unbalance of supply and exhaust air flow rates. Also in a novel concept, users are able to control their room air temperature and boost ventilation with their mobile apps. In a service platform, information of building management systems is merged together with separate IoT based controls and measurements into a cloud server. The implemented environment enables also to collect, together with physical parameter measured in spaces, the feedback of actual comfort perceived by the occupants on the indoor conditions. All that previously mentioned systems create a platform for new service development.

The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a service platform for smart buildings and to demonstrate the performance of the concept in seven meeting rooms of an educational building. In the paper, there is introduced a new concept that is easy to utilize in   retrofit of existing buildings. The main benefits of the novel system compared the standard ones are: 1) the monitoring of the ventilation system performance is improved and possible risk of damages in building envelope could be reduced, 2) the controllability of indoor climate is enhanced in energy efficient manner, and 3) finally users’ perception on the indoor climate is improved.