Application of Reconfigurable Hardware Technology in the Development and Implementation of Building Automation Systems

Abstract

Due to the continuously increasing trend in the costs of the traditional fossil fuels, the development of residential or commercial buildings with reduced energy needs becomes a significant and more pressing scientific challenge. At the same time, consumers are increasingly demanding more comfortable buildings, where the energy needs are addressed using locally available renewable energy resources. Consumers also require a higher level of security, supervision, and control of the building, depending on the needs of the users. The abovementioned expectations present building automation systems design engineers with a challenging situation, which is difficult to approach using classical methods or strategies. As a result, this paper outlines novel facilities and solutions offered by the current level microelectronics in building mechatronics systems development and implementation. In the first step of this endeavor, the benefits of the reconfigurable technology are highlighted and explained. Next, available hardware resources are presented, especially examining the novel FPGA processors-based architectures suited for building automation applications. The feasibility and versatility of such a reconfigurable hardware configuration and parallel computing digital system were tested in a concrete building supervising and control application. The experimental results met the designers' expectations, indicating that the proposed hardware represents a viable solution for a wide range of high performance building automation systems design and development.

Intelligent Buildings as Cyber-Physical Systems: a Reconfigurable Hardware Technology-based Approach

“…Such services may be related to healthcare issues, communication and information services, security services provided, or other human comfort-and convenience linked services. These all together ensure a wide range of high quality, intelligent and user-friendly human life style activities [5,8,9].…”

“…Step by step, such architectures tend to imitate complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs) structure and operation [9]. In fact, the CPS concept means the integration of intelligence and knowledge into physical object, by linking the physical world with information technologies.…”

Saját fejlesztésű vezérlőrendszer

“…Általánosan a HMI (Human Machine Interface) felprogramozása is létra logika szerint történik. Az egyik korábbi projektben a légcsatornás hőszivattyú vezérlését valósítottuk meg [14].…”

Reconfigurable Hardware Technology Application in Buildings Supervising and Monitoring Systems

“…Additionally, reconfigurable hardware technology offers the huge advantages of speed, flexibility, adaptability and easy of scale, representing the ideal solution to many computationally intensive tasks in electrical engineering. All the above features are achieved by seamless and efficient mapping of system functions and re-routing abilities supported by a programming flow that abstracts the hardware implementation details [5,6].…”

“…Hence, instead of using various hardware architectures for different residential or commercial buildings, in this paper a FPGAbased hardware configuration will be presented, which possess the ability of rapidly change its internal structure and wiring configuration between modules. There the key concept is that by using reconfigurable technology, the physical hardware support should be able to "learn and adapt to" each building's specific configuration and automation level [5,6]. Considering the above presented theoretical remarks, an adequate chooses to implement high complexity buildings supervising and monitoring systems is the Digilent Inc. manufactured Genesys Virtex-5 FPGA development board (figure 1) [7].…”