Search results for "Automation"

Automated control systems for indoor lighting: from design to actual performances' assessment

In recent years, but already around 1980, many buildings have been equipped with Building Automation and Control (BAC) systems. These systems were applied as a normal upgrade of traditional systems in different field of the industrial sector. In general, they can be applied to the building plants in order to carry out a series of functions. The main benefits of the installation of this kind of system are well known. First of all, it has been shown that BACs systems installation increases the energy savings and because using many typologies of sensors (e.g. presence detectors to control lighting system) and because, by monitoring the data it is possible to modify plant’s strategies and also …

Methods to Predict Energy Use for Lighting Systems: An Overview and an Application on a Real Case Study

2022

The study of Demand Response strategies application is widely related to the evaluation of the energy consumption. It is fundamental to optimize the design and management of the plants in the smart buildings. During the design steps, it is necessary to predict the above-mentioned energy consumption. This paper reviews some methods that can be applied to predict energy consumption related to lighting systems. In particular, three categories of methods have been analysed: methods proposed by technical standards, methods based on mathematical indices for daylight assessment, and methods based on simulation models. These methods have been described and applied by calculating the energy consumpt…

Energy and environmental impacts of home automation components

2014

Life Cycle Assessment is applied to estimate the life cycle energy and environmental impacts of five components used in the home automation systems: an electricity meter, an actuator with an integrated current sensor, a web server audio/video, an interface with infrared emitter, a multimedia touch screen. For each component, the impacts related to “one unit of product” (selected as functional unit) are assessed following a “from cradle to grave” approach, including the manufacturing, operation and end-of-life steps. The results showed that the operation step gives a contribution higher than 54% on primary energy consumption and variable from about 54% to about 99% on environmental impacts, …

Experimental Set up of Advanced Lighting Systems for Load Shifting Strategies

2021

Shiftable and modulable loads are an essential part of smart grids in the effort for improving the efficiency of the power system and providing new ancillary services. Most of the researches considered shiftable loads and the impact on the power grid. Smart lighting systems are able to modulate their consumption while preserving the visual duty, therefore they can take part to this action. In this context, this paper presents an advanced experimental setup implemented in the SolarLab of the University of Palermo, with the aim of studying the impact on the end-user's energy consumption and on the power grid of smart lighting systems. In this light, different control strategies will be consid…

Constant Heat Input Friction Stir Welding of Variable Thickness AZ31 Sheets Through In-Process Tool Rotation Control

2019

Tailored blanks characterized by variable thickness were friction stir welded (FSWed) with the aim to obtain constant joint properties along the weld seam, regardless of the thickness change. To pursue this goal, the heat input was kept constant by in-process control of tool rotation. A dedicated numerical model of the process was used to determine the tool rotation values as a function of the sheet thickness. The mechanical properties and the microstructure of the FSWed joints, produced with varying process parameters, were studied. It was found that the proposed approach can produce joints with uniform properties along the weld line in terms of stress–strain curve shape, joint strength, e…

Smart Auctions for Autonomic Ambient Intelligence Systems

2020

The main goal of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is to support users in their daily activities by satisfying and anticipating their needs. To achieve such goal, AmI systems rely on physical infrastructures made of heterogenous sensing devices which interact in order to exchange information and perform monitoring tasks. In such a scenario, a full achievement of AmI vision would also require the capability of the system to autonomously check the status of the infrastructure and supervise its maintenance. To this aim, in this paper, we extend some previous works in order to allow the self-management of AmI devices enabling them to directly interact with maintenance service providers. In particular,…

Intelligent Management Systems for Energy Efficiency in Buildings: A Survey

2014

In recent years, reduction of energy consumption in buildings has increasingly gained interest among researchers mainly due to practical reasons, such as economic advantages and long-term environmental sustainability. Many solutions have been proposed in the literature to address this important issue from complementary perspectives, which are often hard to capture in a comprehensive manner. This survey article aims at providing a structured and unifying treatment of the existing literature on intelligent energy management systems in buildings, with a distinct focus on available architectures and methodology supporting a vision transcending the well-established smart home vision, in favor o…

Social-Behavioral Aware Optimization of Energy Consumption in Smart Homes

2018

Residential energy consumption is skyrocketing, as residential customers in the U.S. alone used 1.4 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2014 and the consumption is expected to increase in the next years. Previous efforts to limit such consumption have included demand response and smart residential environments. However, recent research has shown that such approaches can actually increase the overall energy consumption due to the numerous complex human psychological processes that take place when interacting with electrical appliances. In this paper we propose a social-behavioral aware framework for energy management in smart residential environments. We envision a smart home where appliances are int…

Context-awareness for multi-sensor data fusion in smart environments

2016

Multi-sensor data fusion is extensively used to merge data collected by heterogeneous sensors deployed in smart environments. However, data coming from sensors are often noisy and inaccurate, and thus probabilistic techniques, such as Dynamic Bayesian Networks, are often adopted to explicitly model the noise and uncertainty of data. This work proposes to improve the accuracy of probabilistic inference systems by including context information, and proves the suitability of such an approach in the application scenario of user activity recognition in a smart home environment. However, the selection of the most convenient set of context information to be considered is not a trivial task. To thi…

A fog-based hybrid intelligent system for energy saving in smart buildings

2019

In recent years, the widespread diffusion of pervasive sensing devices and the increasing need for reducing energy consumption have encouraged research in the energy-aware management of smart environments. Following this direction, this paper proposes a hybrid intelligent system which exploits a fog-based architecture to achieve energy efficiency in smart buildings. Our proposal combines reactive intelligence, for quick adaptation to the ever-changing environment, and deliberative intelligence, for performing complex learning and optimization. Such hybrid nature allows our system to be adaptive, by reacting in real time to relevant events occurring in the environment and, at the same time, …