Month: July 2008

Smart houses discussed in New York Times

A fun online article in the New York Times discusses the current public perception of smart houses.

The gist of the article was that home automation is, despite appearances, something perfectly obtainable provided someone pays for it. And you no longer have to be either filthy rich or a geek to obtain it. There are however other reasons why people do not invest in home automation.

The most interesting (to me) facts from the article were:

  1. A complete home automation solution can be bought for between US$ 5000-10,000;
  2. There is no evidence for a demand for smart homes from average buyers, except when energy savings are part of the package;
  3. The average american household has 46 electronic devices in it. There’s a great potential for home automation solutions that integrate all these `gadgets’.
Posted on by David Lindelöf 1

Interview: H. Michael Newman

I have just come across a short but interesting interview with H. Michael Newman, the “Father” of BACnet. The interview can be downloaded from here.

Two points in particular caught my interest. One is that according to Newman, as far as standards go, BACnet is an EN standard and thus BACnet is now the “law of the land” in the 28 member states of Europe. But control algorithms cannot be entirely decoupled from the underlying communication philosophy, so I believe algorithm developers might do well to familiarize themselves with the principles of BACnet.

The other was the existence of a textbook on building control written by Michael Newman, Direct Digital Control of Building Systems: Theory and Practice. Textbooks on building control being such a rarity I think this book will be worth a trip to the library.

Posted on by David Lindelöf

Computing sustainability and building automation

The energy demand of computers—including PCs, peripherals, and corporate data centers—produced about 830 million tons of CO2 in 2007, according to a report by the the Global eSustainability Initiative (GeSI), a group of technology firms interested in the potential impact of information and communication technologies on climate change. But they can also help us save energy—the question has always been how, and how much.

The June 21st issue of The Economist comments on this report, summarizing the areas in which computers can help us achieve CO2 savings. The savings estimated in gigatonnes for 2020 are as follows:

  1. Smart grid: 2.03
  2. Smart buildings: 1.68
  3. Smart logistics: 1.52
  4. Smart motors and industrial processes: 0.97
  5. Transport optimisation: 0.60
  6. Teleworking: 0.22
  7. Videoconferencing: 0.14

Notice that smart buildings occupy the number two spot. Enabling buildings that switch off heating and ventilation when nobody is around will, according to the report, reduce our emissions by more than 1.6 billion tons of CO2. Smart buildings had always been touted as an effective CO2 emission reducer, but this is as far as I know the first time a concrete figure is given for those savings. The total emissions from ICT by 2020 is estimated at 1.4 gigatonnes, or one-fifth of the total savings (7.8 gigatonnes).

One should, of course, be extremely suspicious of such data. I have not read the report itself and can’t comment on the methods used to derive these figures. But even if the absolute numbers are wrong, it is encouraging to see that smart buildings are estimated to contribute 20% of all CO2 savings from ICTs by 2020.

Posted on by David Lindelöf

Trends in Smart Buildings Meeting, July 2008

On 4 July 2008 we held at LESO-PB the first of (hopefully) a series of meetings for people interested in home/building automation. The idea is to give people of widely different backgrounds a venue, time and opportunity to share, discuss and explore new ideas.

It was my pleasure to facilitate this meeting and although I did not hold any minutes, you can find here pictures of the notes I took during the meeting.

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We started with introductions. It was great to have people from industry, academia and just plain hobbyists (like yours truly) interested in this subject. One thing we agreed on quite early was to discriminate between building automation (BA) and home automation (HA). BA will typically use completely different hardware and control algorithms than HA, so when a distinction needs to be made we agreed that HA is a subset of BA.

We started the discussion with two questions. 1) What is the state of BA today and 2) What is the role of building simulation in BA.

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David started by telling us about the preliminary research he’s been doing for his PhD work at EPFL. He’s looking for building simulation software that would be modular enough to easily allow testing of different algorithms. This problem was similar to one I’d been working on during my own PhD so we talked a bit about the software I had used, SIMBAD, and in particular how it had been extended with Java/RMI to allow remote processes to connect to it.

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One thing that Antoine stressed was the importance of building simulations for BA designers. The nature of the problem makes it impossible to run tests of control algorithms on real, occupied buildings and to get feedback in a timely manner. And the results would need to be compared to some base case anyway.

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We talked a lot about the academic efforts in building simulation, especially the need for a good model of the users’ behaviour. The fact is that modern simulation packages do not have a good user model, and it is very difficult to estimate the errors being made on energy demand predictions.

On the other hand, it was very unclear whether such user models could be directly used by BA systems to anticipate user actions. Users usually act after some discomfort threshold has been exceeded, but any BA system should try to act before.

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We briefly reviewed the user behaviour models that LESO had been working on for the past years, most notably Jessen’s occupancy model (the subject of his PhD thesis) and Fred’s window opening model.

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Someone mentioned a research group in Zurich. I’m not 100% positive about this but I think this could be the group of Prof. Morari, with whom I had had a brief email exchange a couple of years ago.

Antoine stressed again the importance of reliability in BA systems. The reliability issue brought up a discussion on centralized vs distributed control systems.

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We were shortly running out of time, so I asked the audience their recommendations for academic or trade publications of interest to BA. We concluded the meeting by regretting the lack of real innovation in BA, both academic and industrial, and observed that the big challenge facing building simulation today was the modelling of human factors and the urban environment.

Thanks to everyone who participated, and see you next time!

Posted on by David Lindelöf