Observability: A Principled Approach to Provisioning Sensors in Buildings

Sensor driven building management involves tasks like reducing and optimizing power consumption, monitoring the health of the building appliances, maintaining quality of the atmosphere in the building and tracking occupants in various parts of the building (useful for purposes such as building safety and emergency evacuation) to name a few. This demands observation of various influencing factors on a continuous/regular basis. We call these factors "facets of observability". One simple approach for observing these facets is to place sensors at all the nodes or locations which need to be monitored. However, installing numerous sensors in different parts of the building can a) be tedious and expensive b) cause inconvenience to the users c) increase the Return on Investment period and, d) affect the aesthetics of the building. These issues prompt us to ask the question, "What types of sensors are useful for building energy management and where do we deploy them in a building?" We argue that a sensor, suitable for observing a particular facet, may in turn help to infer other facets. This insight can be exploited to reduce the number of physical sensors deployed in a building. However, the location and type of sensors deployed must be chosen strategically. In this paper, we develop an approach based on these considerations and apply it to monitor various facets in different areas, including a smart classroom complex, in our building. We show that impressive reductions are possible in number of hard sensors needed without compromising on observability. A reduction of at least 48% in energy consumption is an added byproduct of the sensor based building management in our case study which has a fairly high energy consumption baseline.

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