I-Corps Teams: BEES: Building Energy Efficiency Solutions

随着大量的电子产品进入我们的日常生活，技术创新正在重新定义人类舒适的概念，要求它更加个性化和适应性。与此同时，我们一般生活方式和期望的变化伴随着个人能源需求的激增。这就要求智能系统的设计能够在不增加能源压力的情况下达到理想的人类舒适度。在目前的实践中，共享的多使用者空间，如带隔间的办公楼层、会议室、学生宿舍和住宅，其热设置的选择与使用者的数量和个人偏好无关。这种现有的方法不仅不以用户为中心，而且从能耗和居住者满意度/生产力的角度来看，都不是最优的。所提出的方法（建筑能源效率解决方案，BEES）比以孤立的方式控制建筑中每个区域的热设置更具性能效率。BEES解决方案可以部署在多人空间中，使整个空间的居住者更加舒适，同时促进空间的节能运行。考虑到美国近40%的总能源消耗，以及全球20%的总能源消耗来自住宅和商业建筑的使用，一个即插即用的框架可以提高建筑的能源效率，这对建立一个可持续发展的星球有很大的帮助。BEES涉及开发一个万物互联（IoE）平台，作为智能家居和商业楼宇自动化的中心。该解决方案框架由多个组件组成，如用于实时测量建筑参数的分布式传感器、通过智能手机和可穿戴设备提供人机交互界面的移动应用程序、用于整理和解释数据的中央服务器，以及最终与建筑暖通空调控制系统集成。BEES框架通过学习和利用不同组件之间的相关性和联系来优化建筑的热环境，并自适应地实时开发所需的环境模型。运行BEES空间的最佳热设置会根据占用模式、环境条件和其他热变化的变化，以及占用者的反馈和偏好实时更新。

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.