A Perspective Vision on Complex Residential Building Management Systems

Smart buildings have been proposed as the solution for the creation of comfortable and energy-efficient living and working spaces. In the last few years, the energy-efficiency aspect is becoming more and more important and for this reason a lot of research effort has focused on the optimization of energy consumption, especially for what concerns commercial buildings, since they contribute to the 70% of the total energy consumption of an electrical grid. In addition, commercial buildings are usually already equipped with highly-instrumented distributed systems and infrastructures that simplify the creation of a smart environment. Nevertheless, we believe that also residential buildings should be taken into account, since their energy consumption is not negligible (they account for the remaining 30%) and the flexibility of their occupants in the usage of appliances (generally much higher than the ones of commercial buildings) could be better exploited. Within this context, we analyze the hardware infrastructure, intended as the network of sensors, actuators, appliances and accumulators, of this kind of buildings. Moreover, we discuss which kind of networking infrastructures is needed in order to cope with the particularities of complex residential buildings. Finally, we envision a layered architecture, from the aforementioned hardware layer to an envisioned application layer, providing also examples of what could be done, in the near future, to increase the capabilities of our living spaces.