Energy Book for Buildings

Occupants Incorporation in Energy Efﬁciency of Buildings

Nastaran Asadi Zanjani, Georgios Lilis, Gilbert Conus and Maher Kayal

Electronics Laboratory,

Ecole Polytechnique F

erale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

Keywords:

Building Energy Management System, BEMS, Human-Building Interactions, HBI, Human-Building Inter-

face, Smart Occupants, Smart Buildings, Smart Cities.

Abstract:

This paper addresses a bottom-up approach for energy management in buildings. Future smart cities will need

smart citizens, thus developing an interface to connect humans to their energy usage becomes a necessity.

The goal is to give a touch of energy to occupants’ daily behaviours and activities and making them aware

of their decisions’ consequences in terms of energy consumption, its cost and carbon footprint. Second, to

allow people directly interacting and controling their living spaces, that means individual contributions to

their feeling of comfort. Finally, a software solution to keep track of all personal energy related events is

suggested and its possible features are explained.

1 INTRODUCTION

Energy consumption and consequently CO2 emis-

sions have been grown by 49% and 43% respectively.

It is predicted that each year energy consumption is

increasing by the rate of 2% and this value is 1.8% for

CO2 emission (P

erez-Lombard et al., 2008). There-

fore global efforts have been initialized to reduce con-

sumption of energy and emission of CO2.

Buildings are the main energy consumers inside

grids. Thus, achieving efﬁcient optimization in their

energy management can save a considerable amount

of energy. Despite a large number of papers proposing

new and more efﬁcient methods for building energy

management, the penetration of these technologies in

the market and real life is a few.

Recently, researchers have become interested in

developing sustainable strategies and technologies

under the vision of intelligent buildings. Such a

building responds to occupants requirements in en-

ergy conservative manner. In this framework, build-

ings are designed to perform according to standard set

points which are supposed to satisfy majority of occu-

pants’ comforts (Andersen et al., 2009). Studies have

shown that habitants are not always satisﬁed with liv-

ing in such buildings and their predeﬁned set points

do not guarantee occupants’ comfort and satisfaction

together with energy efﬁciency. That is mainly due to

This research is partially funded by Nano-Tera.ch, a pro-

gram of the Swiss Confederation, evaluated by SNSF.

the difﬁculty of deﬁning comfort for different people,

thus occupants’ behaviors and preferences have ma-

jor inﬂuence on buildings’ energy consumption and

carbon footprint (Halfawy and Froese, 2005).

Indeed, presence of occupants inside building is

a main factor for its energy demand. In residential

buildings occupants are responsible for building con-

trol and its costs, therefore the motivation to keep the

balance between their comfort preferences and energy

related behaviors with energy consumption are gener-

ally high (Bourgeois et al., 2006). In contrary to this,

in commercial buildings, occupants are not aware of

consequences of their energy related behaviors and

they are not involved in building control, though the

gap in communication among occupants and build-

ings is felt. In some cases it may happen that occu-

pant’s preference is not aligned with energy goals of

building, then adjusting occupants behavior in a way

that he does it with self-motivation is a crucial fact

in order to increase building energy efﬁciency (Nicol

and Humphreys, 2009).

Dynamic occupant’s behaviors and preferences

are the factors that have been forgotten in the oper-

ation of current Building Energy Management Sys-

tems (BEMS). In other words, due to complexity and

diversity of habitants’ behavioral patterns, usually a

typical occupant’s activities is taken into considera-

tion for control of environment (Mahdavi, 2008).

In this paper the importance of occupant’s aware-

ness of energy consumption and CO2 emission con-

Asadi Zanjani N., Lilis G., Conus G. and Kayal M..

Energy Book for Buildings - Occupants Incorporation in Energy Efﬁciency of Buildings.

DOI: 10.5220/0005492000890094

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems (SMARTGREENS-2015), pages 89-94

ISBN: 978-989-758-105-2

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

sequences of different behaviors (Darby, 2006) is ad-

dressed. We propose web based framework for keep-

ing occupants informed about energy issues and mo-

tivated to care about their consumptions. This pa-

per is organized as follow: in the ﬁrst section we

gave a brief introduction about energy concerns in

buildings, the second section describes our preposi-

tion for human-building interactions platform, in the

third section its impact in daily life is addressed and

ﬁnally comes the conclusion and future work.

2 OCCUPANTS AND ENERGY

CONSUMPTION PLATFORM

Currently, there are intelligent buildings that some-

how beneﬁts from automation using different sen-

sors and actuators. Various control and learning ap-

proaches have been applied in their performances

(Hsu et al., 2010)(Malkawi and Srinivasan, 2005).

The problem is, such methods are too sophisticated

or they do not fulﬁll comfort requirements by occu-

pants (DeWaters and Powers, 2013). In many cases

they predict about occupant’s presence or preferences

which is not always aligned with reality (Gunay et al.,

2014). On the other hand, putting mechanical devices

to control building components such as windows and

facades are costly. Regarding drawbacks and sophis-

tication of such management systems, the question

comes to mind why not using occupant for intelligent

management of his own environment.

There are a lot of software solutions and prod-

ucts to present building’s monitoring and its energy

consumption but to our knowledge except the ones

which took average from whole energy consumption

of building divided to number of occupants, there is

no personalized software that shows each person’s

real time energy consumption. Informing occupants

about total consumption of the living space or build-

ing is not of great advantage. Studies have shown

that usually occupants do not care about it, especially

if the living space is their ofﬁce building (Jazizadeh

et al., 2014), since they share the living space with

others and it is not exactly deﬁned their individual

contribution to the total energy consumption of the

living space. Therefore, the ﬁrst goal is to develop

a personalized software product that can label people

in terms of their energy consumption (Grifﬁth, 2008).

We suggest three different labels:

• Green energy-labeled for the ones who care about

their daily energy consumptions and green gas

emissions to be kept below the predeﬁned stan-

dard quota.

• Yellow energy-labeled for the ones who are

around the quota limits positively.

• Red energy-labeled for the ones who are consum-

ing more than quota limits.

Therefore, it can be seen who are the waster and econ-

omizer of energy in building scale view or further in

city scale view. Limits are deﬁned based on cultural

elements and governmental energy policies. They can

be set adaptively throughout the year based on differ-

ent energy needs or cultural events. In this section a

normalized human-building software product will be

deﬁned and described.

2.1 Energy Book Motivation

In a current daily life, there are social networks like

Facebook and Twitter that we can check updates from

our friends or persons whom we are interested in.

Why not to have a similar web-based framework to

check the appliances we use and own and personal

status as an energy consumer. It can feature compar-

ison among different occupants as a means of com-

petence to achieve efﬁciency goals. We name such a

software solution as Energy Book in courtesy of the

main idea originating from face book.

Thanks to building’s equipment with wireless sen-

sor and actuator networks, we are able to monitor any

energy concerning event happening in the building.

Added to energy-based events we are able to track in-

door environmental changes which have direct conse-

quences in appliances usage. The main challenge is to

personalize this event-based infrastructure. Therefore

each permanent or temporary inhabitants can make

personal proﬁles which introduce them as occupants

of the host buildings in order to handle their comfort

in parallel with their energy consumption.

2.2 Conceptual Model

Applying this software product, user can interact with

his own comfort parameters (temperature, luminos-

ity, scheduling, budget, etc.), energy consumption and

carbon foot print (Paul and Taylor, 2008). Nowa-

days, such a software solution is undeﬁned and unre-

alized for many reasons (O’Brien and Gunay, 2014).

Indeed, this software product should be independent

from the buildings’ types of control and infrastruc-

tures. Its back-end is capable to create a transparent

dialog between any building and occupants. There-

fore, a dynamic generation of software products for

building environments that actively adapts to user and

data environment is in need. The general goal is, in-

terfacing human with comfort, power and energy in a

manner that is depicted in ﬁgure1.

SMARTGREENS2015-4thInternationalConferenceonSmartCitiesandGreenICTSystems

Figure 1: Conceptual Diagram.

While time relates power to energy consumption

and these two are deterministic and can be formu-

lated, the third which is based on human feelings is

totally stochastic. Human comfort itself has multiple

dimensions. Thermal, visual, acoustic, air quality are

some of these comforts. In this work, we aim to come

up with a transfer function which relates human com-

fort to energy consumption and coming ﬁnally to efﬁ-

ciency that satisﬁes the comfort constraints in a given

period. There should be always a trade-off between

human comfort, peak of power, energy and carbon

footprint.

2.3 Infrastructure Overview

Nowadays, typical infrastructure for an intelligent

building is a network of sensors together with actua-

tors which monitors environmental parameters (Wood

and Newborough, 2003) and act on some selected

loads. Indeed, we beneﬁt from such a framework with

some differences.

We deﬁne different living spaces inside building

as cells. Each cell depended on its shape is equipped

with one or two wireless sensor node. They are capa-

ble of measuring temperature, humidity, luminosity

and presence. On the other hand, all the electrical de-

vices are equipped with smart plugs which are based

on standard commercial components. They are able

to measure power consumption of devices being at-

tached to them and send the measurements through

power line communication (PLC) to a central server.

Additional to these abilities, one can turn the device

on and off remotely. When the load can be dimmed

i.e. lights, the plugs are able to perform dimming up

or down.

The mentioned above infrastructure enables load

monitoring and assessing its consumption through out

the day. History of measurements is saved as time se-

ries data base. A web application deals with present-

ing each sensor or plug measurements and status. A

real time server guarantees receiving and representing

the most recent measurements and changes. Such an

infrastructure is designed to be an open environment

and it can be applied for any type of building. We call

the buildings equipped with such a platform As smart

buildings to be listed in our software platform.

3 ENERGY BOOK IN DAILY LIFE

It is important to develop Energy Book as appealing

and user-friendly as possible. First, it must be pre-

sented as means of comfort manipulation and maxi-

mization. It should be taken into consideration that in

many buildings people are not in charge of paying en-

ergy costs, so in those buildings another policy must

be thought of. Its widespread usage as a new type of

social network and its performance as an enterprise

or cooperation can be planned from business-models

point of view.

Energy Book development can be organized as

software engineering project. National energy goals

and governmental energy policies should be taken

into the account. This bottom-up approach can be up-

scaled to the grid and demand-side management to-

wards smart cities. In this section we try to explain

different modules in such a software product. The

overview of it is depicted in ﬁgure 2. Like other web

applications, it should have a module to handle user

as it works on the same basis. User proﬁle design and

settings are categorized in the same module.

3.1 Occupant Living Spaces

During the day, we spend our lives in different places.

In a residential building as our home, in a commercial

or an ofﬁce building as our working place and ﬁnally

in public places like commercial centers, gyms, cine-

mas, etc. as locations for our leisure/outgoings time

passing. Depended on being equipped with monitor-

ing sensors/actuators and being registered in Smart

Building Web Application, occupants can choose

daily living buildings in their own proﬁle whether it is

residential, ofﬁce/commercial or public one, thus they

can proceed to choose corresponding living spaces

throughout the list of cells being listed in each smart

building. For the buildings have not been smart and

listed in website yet, the software package should pro-

vide special spaces for users to deﬁne, describe and

categorize the buildings virtually.

Inside buildings we have shared or personal liv-

ing spaces. For instance, in a residential building, the

EnergyBookforBuildings-OccupantsIncorporationinEnergyEfficiencyofBuildings

Figure 2: Energy Book software product modules.

spaces can be categorized as personal or shared, that

is in a typical family apartment, bedrooms and private

bathrooms if any, are personal while living rooms,

kitchen and bathroom is shared. Thanks to current

database architecture in our smart building web appli-

cation, one can select his own living spaces whether

it is personal or shared throughout the list of living

spaces inside each building. Further, they will be able

to add non-listed buildings and conﬁgure them man-

ually to be accepted by website development team

as virtual living spaces that have not been smart yet.

Such tasks and performance will be the job of living

space handler module.

3.2 Ownership Deﬁnition

The procedure continues to electrical devices selec-

tion regardless of being owned by one or multiple

person. To do so, after user login into website and

selection of buildings and living spaces inside them,

the registered electrical devices in each selected liv-

ing spaces will be presented to user. The occupant

can choose his ownership of devices. If the appli-

ance is selected by one person it would be categorized

as personal and its power measurements is summed

in its owner’s proﬁle, however if a device is used by

multiple persons its power consumption is shared be-

tween the people who has registered themselves as

its operators. Adaptive parameters should be thought

up to be assigned to each user’s corresponding con-

sumption. The issue can be handled by using own-

ers’ schedule and data mining algorithms. Ownership

Handler module is responsible for this job. Finally,

each occupant has his own list of appliances and he

can control them using the plugs ability to be han-

dled remotely throughout the web. Apart from such

smart devices, there may be some that has not been

speciﬁed in the system or equipped with measurement

technology, the software solution is to prepare user

with an environment to select or deﬁne his load. Dif-

ferent loads can be categorized as IT, beauty, kitchen

and so on. Based on their brand and type, the typical

power usage should be searched and proposed to user

or he can deﬁne it his self. These virtual loads are to

be handled properly and be distinguished with those

who beneﬁts from real time power measurements.

3.3 Energy and Carbon Footprint

Calculator

Having listed all energy-consumers’ belongings in

different locations in the smart city, users are able to

monitor and maintain their daily energy consumption

and consequently carbon footprint. The calculations

is based on power consumption measured by plugs at-

tached to the devices. Energy calculation can be done

on hourly, daily or even quarterly and yearly basis.

Therefore, people can be categorized as green, yellow

or red energy labeled. From building point of view,

using the aforementioned labels, there is an overview

of occupants’ behavior. We assign calculation han-

dler to do all calculations and analyses regarding the

energy. Consumption reports to the occupant is in his

own national currency in order to attract more atten-

tion from his part. Governmental pricing for energy

and their ﬁne policies for extra usage are taken into

consideration for reported values.

The calculation handler could be extended by giv-

ing a user an estimate of consumption using physics

models and laws especially for indoor climate control

(Yang et al., 2014). Therefore, user can calculate en-

ergy consequences of his own comfort decisions be-

SMARTGREENS2015-4thInternationalConferenceonSmartCitiesandGreenICTSystems

forehand. Then he can decide in a more conscious

and intelligent manner instead of using trial error ap-

proach to adjust his comfort settings.

We believe providing occupant with information

in terms of the money he should pay as the expenses

of his speciﬁc energy-related behaviors, will direct

him to care more about his usage (Brounen et al.,

2013). The additional value of such a system is that

based on occupants type of energy behavior, building

management system can provide recommendations of

saving strategies to occupants. These prepositions can

be categorized as general or personal ones. They can

receive votes from occupants such as like/dislike. The

vote record system can help recommendations to be

promoted as persistent or degraded to temporary ones.

The less useful suggestions are discarded.

3.4 Sharing and Competence in Energy

Goals Achievements

No method is more efﬁcient than comparing individu-

als with others. Competitions have been always inter-

esting for human beings. Behavioral studies conﬁrm

that sharing information about others performances

are the best way to encourage people to behave dif-

ferently. Occupants who co-habit in the same living

space can share their individual energy consumptions

corresponding to that common living space with each

other and compare their personal usage and their con-

tribution in total energy consumption of the speciﬁc

living space . Although they can set personal or com-

mon energy goals to be achieved in short or long term

(Diamantaki et al., 2013). They can add co-habitants

or other occupants as their friends to share their en-

ergy achievements. Sharing Handler is responsible to

offer such services.

Here comes the security issue which is an im-

portant matter to be dealt with. Security in such a

web service should be handled in a way that does

not harm personal privacies or conﬁdential buildings

facts. They can be deﬁned as general privacies to

be applied for all buildings, loads, and occupants or

building speciﬁed securities that may differ from one

to another. Giving rights of control and monitoring of

some loads to speciﬁc or VIP occupants is an example

of such building-speciﬁc privacies, which emphasize

that enormous attention should be paid to security is-

sues in Energy Book.

For loads that are categorized as personal, it

should be considered that no one else could access to

its consumption monitoring and control. For shared

devices, sometimes it is needed to put a limit on num-

ber of owners and deﬁne privacy not to be accessed

from strangers. We believe that security issues is one

of the biggest modules to be handled in such a prod-

uct and meticulous planning and design should be ap-

plied for it. Security handler will be the part to deal

with such issues. Indeed, the mentioned above tasks

are of great importance in the software package.

3.5 Further Extensions

In fact, such a web-based service can be extended to

an ecosystem with different tasks and versatilities. In-

deed, a lot of new applications could be added when

it is in beta. We believe that many interesting appli-

cations will arise when it is applied in real life. The

software product should be designed systematically to

accept further improvements and extensions. Contri-

butions from users to expand its application and ser-

vices should be acceptable. For different countries,

various cultural elements should be included in this

software solution.

4 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we suggest a software product which

provides occupants with a platform that makes them

aware of their personal energy consumption in order

to encourage them with a helping approach for their

behaviors modiﬁcation towards energy efﬁciency in

buildings. The platform could be accessed through

web services on any kind of smart devices and it guar-

antees real time streaming of energy data and con-

trol over personal or shared equipments. It has been

proven that in the buildings providing informative and

comparative feedbacks can be used as an effective in-

centive for occupants to adopt energy efﬁcient behav-

iors.

Such a software product will be fully developed

and incorporated in real life examinations. To list

some of the future work, it will be expanded to be

applied in future smart cities. Also, the effect of nom-

inative information about how occupants personal

energy-conserving behaviors is compared with others

in the same living space will be tested. Anthropo-

logical studies can be conducted using this software

solution in order to more deeply analyze human be-

haviors concerning energy. Study and development of

comparative and competitive strategies for efﬁciently

encouragement of users will be one of the most im-

portant research areas to invest on.

EnergyBookforBuildings-OccupantsIncorporationinEnergyEfficiencyofBuildings

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