Improving energy efficiency of residential building automation system considering user contexts enriched by smartphones - German Use case -

Abstract

The residential sector represents a big part of the energy consumption. In Europe, households represented 25% of the total energy consumption in 2014. Furthermore, the International Energy Agency in 2013 established a goal of 77% reduction of the carbon footprint when compared to 2050. One approach for saving energy is by introducing Building Automation Systems (BAS) which can reduce the residential carbon footprint by 38% in the German scenario. User context detection can help to improve the overall carbon savings from BASs, and smartphones can be used for user context detection. In this work, a smartphone was integrated to a BAS, in order to explore its benefits by increasing heating efficiency in residential BAS for one bedroom. Besides heating, lights, and some appliances in the house were also controlled by the use of smartphone sensors such as: GPS, infrared, light, accelerometer and gyroscope. The following user contexts were identified: user occupancy and activities as sleeping, awakening, and partying. In order to compare the energy efficiency of the current system, the heater response was simulated for four scenarios: fixed schedules, presence detection by motion sensor and exit button, absence of controllers and the ideal response. Preliminary results, show that the introduction of smartphones in BASs can increase energy efficiency from 14% to 50% when compared to other solutions.