Smart environment monitoring testbed

Reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions, maintaining an acceptable comfort level within a building, is a very complex problem that in the recent year has caught growing interest by the scientific community. The developed architecture integrates two different monitoring networks: the ‘Fixed Network’ and the ‘Custom Network.’ The ‘Fixed Network’ is an industrial control system able to collect data, control and monitor real-time consumptions through specific power modules plugged into an electrical cabinet. The ‘Custom Network’ is a system realized through low-cost commercial devices, located inside the building, to collect the continuous measurements for the internal comfort. Therefore, thanks to the use of those measuring instruments, it is possible to track both the energy consumptions and the internal comfort indicators that influence the assessment of the building model. Once data are collected, a software architecture has been designed for managing pseudo-real-time data flows, taking into account flexibility and speed of storage and retrieval. Such architecture can apply a pre-processing filtering phase and then analyzes relevant data recognizing anomalies like plant malfunction or users’ bad habits. The system is implemented in academic buildings of “Roma Tre” University, with some preliminary but important results.