Mems ‘smart Dust Motes’ for Designing, Monitoring and Enabling Efficient Lighting

This project focused on office lighting monitoring and control based on the new MEMS ‘smart dust mote’ sensor technology. Benchmarking tests on the target office space were used to estimate the potential energy saving and environmental benefits that could be achieved by introducing smart motes into an intelligent lighting control system. A sensor validation and fusion algorithm was developed to extract valuable information from redundant sensor readings. A prototype mote sensor network, called BESTnet, was constructed to demonstrate the performance of the validation and fusion algorithm. The intelligent decision making framework developed makes use of the fused sensor readings, and balances the conflicting preferences of occupants sharing a common light source. The results of this research will enable future work in developing and implementing demand-responsive control through load-shedding during times of peak electricity pricing.