An IoT-Based Solution for Monitoring a Fleet of Educational Buildings Focusing on Energy Efficiency

Abstract

Raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage is key to achieving sustained energy saving. Additionally, young people are very sensitive to environmental protection so raising awareness among children is much easier than with any other group of citizens. This work examines ways to create an innovative Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both the users (faculty, staff, students, parents) and school buildings, thus motivating and supporting young citizens’ behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. A mixture of open-source IoT hardware and proprietary platforms on the infrastructure level, are currently being utilized for monitoring a fleet of 18 educational buildings across 3 countries, comprising over 700 IoT monitoring points. Hereon presented is the system’s high-level architecture, as well as several aspects of its implementation, related to the application domain of educational building monitoring and energy efficiency. The system is developed based on open-source technologies and services in order to make it capable of providing open IT-infrastructure and support from different commercial hardware/sensor vendors as well as open-source solutions. The system presented can be used to develop and offer new app-based solutions that can be used either for educational purposes or for managing the energy efficiency of the building. The system is replicable and adaptable to settings that may be different than the scenarios envisioned here (e.g., targeting different climate zones), different IT infrastructures and can be easily extended to accommodate integration with other systems. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in real-world environment in terms of scalability, responsiveness and simplicity.

On Mining IoT Data for Evaluating the Operation of Public Educational Buildings

“…Our approach aims to provide a monitoring framework that allow the continuous evaluation of the conditions of classrooms. The GAIA platform [6] provides real-time monitoring of 18 school buildings (see Table 1), spread in 3 countries (Greece, Italy, Sweden), covering a range of local climatic conditions and educational levels (primary, secondary and high school). In each of the 18 buildings participating in the GAIA platform, sensor devices are deployed that measure (a) the overall power consumption of the building, (b) the environmental comfort within each individual classroom and (c) the weather conditions and air pollution levels in each building.…”

“…1. For a detailed introduction to the platform, the provided services and the implemented applications see [6,9,11,13,14]. The IoT devices can be split into 3 different categories based on their origin and operation type: Power Consumption These devices are situated on the general electricity distribution board of each building to measure the power consumption of each one of the 3-phase power supply.…”

Design and realization of an open‐source and modular smart meter

“…Moreover, nonelectrical parameters could be measured using special transducers to sense heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) parameters like temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, and airflow . Moreover, recent works have proposed smart school building structure to reinforce the education sector on promoting efficient energy usage …”

“…17 Moreover, recent works have proposed smart school building structure to reinforce the education sector on promoting efficient energy usage. [18][19][20] Smart meters are used to manage energy consumption by controlling the switching of different electric equipment over different times of the day based on energy analysis and loads' profiles. 21 Furthermore, Internet of Things (IoT) has a prime rule in making the monitoring systems in smart buildings into an efficient energy management systems.…”

An IoT-Based Gamified Approach for Reducing Occupants’ Energy Wastage in Public Buildings

“…However, during our ethnographic studies and online surveys with the occupants of the pilot sites of ChArGED, we found that observing actions of others would violate their privacy concerns and that penalizing users for their non-energy efficient behavior would completely demotivate them to engage into the game in the first place. In the context of other public buildings, Amaxilatis et al [13] aim to increase energy awareness and alter energy-consumption behaviors of children through educational activities in schools. Johnson et al [14] reviewed multiple energy-saving competitions among university students and identified several pitfalls in their design.…”