Data-Driven Smart Buildings

Overview

This project imagines a future world empowered by access to discoverable, reliable, ubiquitous real-time data from buildings, such that digital solutions can rapidly scale and where energy efficiency knowledge can be widely encapsulated and disseminated within highly accessible software ‘Applications’. Applications, in this context, are conceived as easy-to-configure and instantiate software microservices, built on top of a common software infrastructure that facilitates data access under well-defined application program interfaces (APIs), deployed on edge-computing devices or the cloud.  Such Applications are somewhat analogous to the ‘Apps‘ we use on personal mobile devices.

By embracing modern IT approaches, the hope is that the management and operation of building services can be simplified to overcome energy efficiency skills barriers and reduce reliance on manual interventions. Inside this vision, the purpose of the project is to help harness the emerging digital technology revolution to both reduce energy use in buildings, and to enable buildings to participate as distributed energy resources in support of increased use of variable renewable electricity sources. The project achieves this through developments in ‘Software as a Service’ innovation and intelligent data-driven building automation. 

The project objectives are to:

• provide the knowledge, standards, protocols and procedures for low-cost high-quality data capture, sharing and utilization in buildings
• develop a Building Emulator platform that enables testing, development and assessment of the impact of alternative building HVAC control strategies in a digital environment
• develop building energy efficiency software Applications that can be used and ideally commercialized for reducing energy use in buildings
• drive adoption of results through case studies, business model innovation and results dissemination

The planned deliverables from this project are:

• a proposal for government leadership on data sharing from their buildings;
• an MVP Open Data Platform functional-requirements report;
• an online repository of exemplar datasets for building analytics research;
• a set of data-driven control-oriented building models for different scenarios;
• emulator prototype(s);
• a software repository, containing the prototype software implementations and descriptions of each application;
• reports.