By Nidhi DhullReviewed by Susha Cheriyedath, M.Sc.Nov 12 2024A recent review article published in Applied Sciences explored and compared various solutions to measure building parameters for an effective smart building monitoring system that accounts for building occupant behavior, sensor deployment, and implementation complexity.
Study: A Comprehensive Review of Sensor-Based Smart Building Monitoring and Data Gathering Techniques. Image Credit: metamorworks/Shutterstock.com
Smart Building Monitoring Architecture
Building automation and control systems (BACSs) have become crucial elements of advanced building management technologies. These systems comprise hardware and software elements for automated controlling and regulating diverse building systems through enhanced connectivity for effective communication, decision-making, and automated control.
BACS encompasses three layers: management, automation (supervisory), and field. The management layer forms the human-machine interface, including operator and monitoring units, all linked to a principal data processing system. Alternatively, the automation layer forms the primary hub for communication and control of various communication networks integrating several discrete devices.
The field level includes physical input sensors, actuators, and output activators. These application-specific controllers distributed throughout the building provide monitoring and control functions. Furthermore, the three-layer BACS architecture employs a neutral supervisor above the automation layer, ensuring interoperability between various systems and devices for operational precision and efficiency in building management.
Smart Building Monitoring Applications
A thorough building optimization system enables monitoring of all building and facility management aspects, including space utilization, energy usage, water consumption, and allocation.
Automated lighting management systems reduce energy usage while ensuring visual comfort for occupants. Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based lighting control enables effective smart building management and control. Additionally, strategies like time scheduling, daylight harvesting, and occupancy control are used for light management.
Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems help control a building’s climate to ensure occupant comfort and safety. These systems generally control temperature, humidity, air distribution, and indoor air quality. Additionally, smart HVAC systems improve energy efficiency and automatically control the indoor climate for comfort.
However, HVAC systems consume the most energy in office buildings, necessitating careful optimization for energy efficiency and environmental impact. This can be achieved through designing buildings to lower heating and cooling loads. Moreover, the static (building materials, orientation, and placement) and dynamic (weather data, occupancy characteristics, energy use, and water use) parameters should be monitored for energy consumption.
Water consumption monitoring through smart water meters helps detect water leaks and avoid wastage. Monitoring occupant end-use habits can enable water preservation in a building and predict future water consumption. Furthermore, water quality sensors allow for monitoring the quality of water.
Most importantly, indoor occupancy data is crucial for an intelligent building system. Motion or occupancy sensors allow accurate prediction and data-driven decision-making to minimize operational energy and water consumption through the efficient control of the HVAC systems in commercial buildings.
Data Aggregation
Effective data management enhances data exchange, facilitating an interoperable building model and defining the specifications of building components throughout its life cycle. Additionally, smart building applications require combining data from multiple decentralized systems. This necessitates advanced computing infrastructures and the capability to handle high data generation demands.
Heterogeneous sensors in smart buildings generate substantial data at an accelerated rate due to persistent monitoring. Therefore, real-time analytics (RTA) is imperative for continuous and seamless data processing. RTA offers valuable insights for prompt decision-making, improving monitoring system efficiency and reliability.
Sensor fusion in smart buildings combines data from various IoT sensors to create a cohesive, accurate, and reliable understanding of the monitored system’s behavior, thus improving building operations. It enables thorough and consistent data analysis for individual sensors while combining data from multiple sensors improves the dataset’s precision, reliability, and clarity.
However, the sensor fusion process faces several challenges, including the imperfection and correlation of data, inconsistencies, and the heterogeneity of the datasets. These could be alleviated using an infrastructure-as-a-service approach for initial validation and baseline data acquisition.
Alternatively, building information modeling (BIM) can tackle issues related to information exchange, interoperability, and effective collaboration throughout a building’s lifecycle. The synergy between BIM, IoT devices, and BACS enables more intelligent handling of large, complex, and dynamic sensor data, enabling data-driven building management. For instance, while time series data from IoT sensors provide numerical values and patterns, BIM provides context and semantic connections between the building’s systems.
Conclusion
Overall, the researcher comprehensively reviewed and compared various sensor technologies used in building monitoring. The data collection challenges from a sensor network and the subsequent structuring and processing of these data were discussed.
BACSs allow building managers and facility operators to monitor crucial parameters and operations within complex environments by gathering reliable, real-time data. Thus, managing smart buildings necessitates advanced computing infrastructures capable of handling high volumes of data generation.
The researchers suggest developing a compatible smart facility monitoring framework suitable for different public building architectures, strategically integrating IoT devices and sensors within the BACS and BIM.
Journal Reference
Lavrinovica, I., Judvaitis, J., Laksis, D., Skromule, M., & Ozols, K. (2024). A Comprehensive Review of Sensor-Based Smart Building Monitoring and Data Gathering Techniques. Applied Sciences, 14(21), 10057–10057. DOI: 10.3390/app142110057, https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/21/10057
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