Building Occupancy & Comfort Inference

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Summary of the entity:

The Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) is one of the largest research centres in Greece; top 1 in north Greece. Its mission is to promote the triplet Research – Development – Innovation by conducting high quality research and developing innovative products and services while building strong partnerships with industry and strategic collaborations with academia and other research and technology organisations in Greece and abroad.

More than 800 people work at CERTH with the majority being scientists. CERTH has received numerous awards and distinctions, while it is listed among the Top-20 of the EU’s Research Centres with the highest participation in H2020 competitive research grants.

It is active in a large number of application sectors (energy, buildings and construction, health, manufacturing, robotics, (cyber)security, transport, smart cities, space, agri-food, marine and blue growth, water, etc.) and technology areas such as data and visual analytics, data mining, machine and deep learning, virtual and augmented reality, image processing, computer and cognitive vision, human computer interaction, IoT and communication technologies, navigation technologies, cloud and computing technologies, distributed ledger technologies (blockchain), (semantic) interoperability, system integration, mobile and web applications, hardware design and development, smart grid technologies and solutions and social media analysis.

Summary of the challenge:

The goal of this challenge is to develop an engine capable to estimate the occupancy inside a building as well the comfort conditions utilizing only energy consumption from the central panel and indoor environmental conditions information.

Description:

Stakeholder: Building managers, Building owners, Energy utilities – DATA ANALYSIS

Description:

One disadvantage of smart buildings is the purchase and installation of many IoT devices and sensors that should be installed in the building. This cost in conjunction with the occupants’ disruption during the installation does not allow them to buy and install them.

Thus, there is a huge necessity for extracting meaningful information without disturbing occupants. This can be achieved by exploiting only the energy consumption from the central panel. Using only this information, the algorithm should be able to infer the occupancy inside the building, that is, if the occupant is in the house if he/she sleeps or he/she is away. Furthermore, the engine should be able to extract the comfort conditions inside the building, utilizing only information from temperature, humidity, and luminance sensors, as well as external weather conditions. This information is of high importance, to operate a building in a non-intrusive manner.

The information exchange, in all cases, should be performed in a secure manner, so as to maintain the occupants’ privacy, and not release personal sensitive information to the cloud. For this reason, CERTH’s “Audit Messages Storage Platform”, from the REACH toolbox, could be used to store sensitive data about the building, the occupants, and the conditions inside the building. This data would be shared only between trusted parties and under specific permissions.

Data:

REACH Data Providers:

• CERTH_energy
  • Building energy consumption (W)
  • Building energy consumption (kWh)
  • Temperature (Celsius)
  • Humidity (%)
  • Luminance (lux)

Expected outcomes:

To create a data value chain that allows:

1. >90% occupancy inference detection;
2. >99% coherence at comfort inference;