GreenMind - An Architecture and Realization for Energy Smart Buildings
Sustainability and energy-efficiency are receiving increasing attention. Existing buildings are responsible for more than 40% of the worlds total primary energy consumption. Current building management systems fail to reduce unnecessary energy consumption and preserve to user comfort at the same time mainly because they are unable to cope with dynamical 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 sub-systems; i.e., heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting, workstations and other appliances subsystems, in order to save significant amount of energy whilst preserving user comfort. Experimental results carried out in a 12.000 square meter building of the University of Groningen show that our 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 workstation as well as other appliances are 33% and 10%, respectively.