I-Corps Teams: BEES: Building Energy Efficiency Solutions

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As a multitude of electronic gadgets make their way into our day-to-day lives, technological innovations are redefining the notion of human comfort, requiring it to be more personalized and adaptive. At the same time, changes in our general living style and expectations are accompanied with a surge in our individual energy demands. This calls for the design of smart systems that can achieve desired human comfort levels without putting additional pressure on energy resources. In current practices, shared multi-occupant spaces such as office floors with cubicles, conference rooms, student dorms, and homes, thermal settings are chosen irrespective of the number of occupants and their individual preferences. This existing approach is not only non user-centric but also sub-optimal from both energyconsumption and occupant satisfaction/productivity perspectives. The proposed approach (Building Energy Efficiency Solutions, BEES) is more performance-efficient than controlling the thermal setting of each zone in the building in an isolated manner. BEES solution can be deployed in multi-occupant spaces to make the occupants of the entire space more comfortable, and simultaneously facilitate energy efficient operation of the space. Given that nearly 40% of the total energy consumption in US, and 20% of the total energy consumption worldwide is attributed to residential and commercial building usage, a plug-n-play framework for improving energy efficiency of buildings can go a long way towards establishing a sustainable planet.BEES involves developing an Internet of Everything (IoE) platform that acts as a hub for smart home and commercial building automation. The solution framework comprises multiple components such as distributed sensors for real time measurement of building parameters, mobile applications to provide interface for human interaction enabling feedback mechanism through smart phones and wearables, a central server to collate and interpret the data, and finally integration with the building HVAC control system. BEES framework optimizes the thermal environment of a building by learning and utilizing the correlations and connections between different components, and adaptively developing the required environmental model in real time. The optimal thermal setting of the space running BEES is updated in real time based on changes in occupancy pattern, ambient conditions and other thermal variations, along with occupant's feedback and preferences.