GreenMind - An architecture and realization for energy smart buildings

Abstract

Existing buildings are responsible for more than 40% of the world's total primary energy consumption. Current building management systems fail to reduce unnecessary energy consumption and preserve user comfort at the same time mainly because they are unable to cope with dynamic changes caused by user's interaction with the environment. To cope with this dynamicity, we propose a software architecture for energy smart buildings that includes a set of concrete software solutions that tackle energy consumption subsystems, i.e., heating/cooling, lighting, workstations, and appliances, in order to save significant amount of energy whilst preserving user comfort. Experimental results carried out in the Bernoulli building, a 12.000 square meter building of the University of Groningen, show that the proposed solutions are able to save up to 56% of electricity used for lighting, at least 20% of electricity used for heating while the savings from controlling workstations as well as other appliances are 33% and 10%, respectively. Totally, our solution is expected to bring up to 28% of saving over total energy consumption in buildings such as the Bernoulli building.