SELF-CORRECTING INTELLIGENT BUILDING ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (SCI-BEMS)
The SCI-BEMS vision is to deliver a lightweight, cost-effective Building Energy Management System that will co-optimize energy consumption and user comfort in residential buildings and districts with a positive impact on the local grid.
The Heat4Cool SCI-BEMS will comprise a central control gateway, which will include the middleware gateway, the control intelligence, interfaces toward energy subsystems as well as a Facility Manager UI that will enable the facility manager to configure the system, monitor home/building/district operations, analyze demand flexibility and its aggregation, deploy control strategies and leverage their results for energy efficiency and demand response offerings.
The Heat4Cool SCI-BEMS serves as the central intelligence that will coordinate all available energy resources, including heating/cooling systems, renewables, etc., in order to fulfil user expectations of comfortable living with the minimal possible energy consumption.
The residential domain addressed in Heat4Cool implies the usage of lightweight management systems -such as advanced home HVAC control systems – compared to the monolithic BEMS that are typically employed in tertiary buildings. System intelligence in residential market offerings is homogeneous across vendors. All solutions allow for:
- central rule/schedule based control strategies, including on/off switching, thermostat set point setting,
- exploiting occupancy and outdoor ambient information (temperature, humidity) to control indoor ambience.
These features enable consistent HVAC performance to predetermined and centrally controlled levels but lack any aspect of personalized control, handing over this decision to the occupant. In addition, these solutions completely ignore energy efficiency aspects and fail to incorporate any grid considerations even at the level of individual residences. Furthermore these systems address individual households and lack the view of neighbouring apartments/ houses/ buildings which is essential in order to provide coordinated strategies that can effectively aid the grid.
SCI-BEMS as part of HEAT4COOL Framework
Its main objective is to understand user comfort preferences and always maintain the indoor environment with the comfort zone of the occupants.
To achieve this, the SCI-BEMS infers user preferences on indoor temperature -which they may even be unable to describe- from their control actions and create personalised user profiles that quantify personal thermal preferences vs. comfort trade-offs. Based on these profiles it automatically adjusts HVAC and water heating according to ambient conditions in the indoor environment.
Heat4Cool aims to deal with the temporal and intra-person heterogeneity of personal preferences in multi-tenant/family households. User comfort preferences are seldom very precise, humans feel comfortable within ranges of temperatures or other ambient characteristics. This enables control strategies ranging from maximum user comfort, maximum energy efficiency with controlled comfort degradation or intermediate combinations energy savings and user comfort levels.
Finally, the SCI-BEMS will not focus at the local household scope, but will have a global view at the level of apartment building and/or district. This enables coordinated inter-household control strategies that can effectively a) reuse energy available anywhere within the building/district that is reusable by another house in order to become as zero-energy as possible toward the grid, and b) shape the reduced building/ district level energy consumption patterns according to the requests of the grid operator