Monitoring and Modeling Building Energy Expenditure with Sensor Networks

Residential and commercial buildings constitute one of the largest energy consumption sectors in industrialized countries. This paper introduces a flexible commissioning system for maximizing energy usage efficiency in large and complex buildings. The system exploits (i) a data management scheme that uses distributed wireless sensors networks for environmental monitoring, (ii) a data analysis framework and (iii) a monitoring interface. The system focuses on energy saving models to efficiently acquire and process sensor network data, thus reducing energy consumption and costs through the whole process. Novel protocol mechanisms are included in the implementation of the network to reduce its energy expenditure while maintaining a realiable communication. Special attention is placed in developing the performance monitoring interface, specifically designed for increasing personal energy consciousness of end-users. The overall system has been implemented at the Politecnico di Torino main site.