Exploring the use of wireless sensor networks in building management

Due to the raising awareness of sustainability, energy efficient buildings have received significant attention by the academia and industry. Current practice of energy monitoring and control mainly relies on wired sensors, which are expensive and difficult to maintain. Moreover, systems servicing buildings do not “talk to each other”, which creates silos of information resulting in inefficient Building Management (BM) practices. The paper proposes a system framework for implementing Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in building energy control and BM. WSN is an emerging technology that uses scattered sensor nodes that can sense, compute and communicate. The proposed WSNs system framework aims to integrate the required BM data into WSN for automating real-time on-site data access and processing, in which the WSN becomes an information service provider to BM applications and personnel. A web enabled central platform is proposed to process and distribute the data, and to integrate other Building Management Systems (BMS). With its application, we expect not only to continuously monitor the energy use in buildings, but also to facilitate BM functions via the distributed databases and integrated BMS.