Human-in-the-Loop Digitalisation & Energy Management of Buildings - HuiL-DEMand

Many buildings suffer from a “performance gap”, due to inefficient operations and irrational occupant behavior, which, combined, jeopardize the effort to make the building stock carbon neutral, affecting both CO₂ emissions and health and comfort of occupants.

Goal of HuiL-DEMand is to demonstrate the integration of the personal perception of the indoor climate into the management system of buildings.We do this by further developing a software platform for the monitoring and management of buildings, that integrates information from IoT sensors (measuring temperature, humidity, CO₂ concentration, etc.), devices measuring system performance (energy use, system temperature), and outdoor climate conditions, together with the subjective feed-back of the occupants.

With this software solution, occupants are no longer requested to enter setpoint of thermostats. Instead, when they perceive a discomfort, they can use a dedicated mobile app to rate the indoor environment. The data-driven algorithms demonstrated in this project will use and combine the objective measurements from the IoT devices and the subjective feedback from the occupants, together with weather forecast services, to properly control the heating of two school buildings at room level, maximising comfort and optimising the energy use.

Besides, state-of-art AI is used for fault detection in systems and buildings control.