EMG4B

Energy Management Gateway for Buildings

Responsable

Période

January 2014 - June 2015

Axes

Software-oriented Heterogeneous Device Support

Energy Management Gateway for Buildings (EMG4B) aims at designing a framework capable of hosting energy related services for buildings.

The project is inspired from the smartphone eco-system, as summarized below:

Applications are decoupled from the underlying platform; applications can be added or removed at any time.
Standard abstract models and software interfaces allow applications to access the platform’s peripheral resources (heat-pump, photovoltaic inverter, boiler, …) in a uniform way.

Better buildings' energy efficiency has a large impact on the global energy system as buildings account for about 40 % of the overall energy consumption. Performance can be improved by three means: improved envelope, improved control, more appropriate building users’ behavior.

The present project addresses primarily the control aspect. It can also provide information to trigger users’ behavior changes.

Energy performance must be optimized at the district level as a whole and not only at the level of a single building.

Buildings are considered to be elements of a complex district level energy system. Each building features a local controller, which is supervised by a district controller.

Two challenges must be solved to enable the large-scale deployment of such distributed control systems:
1. Appropriate distributed management strategies must be defined.
2. A low cost "plug and play" infrastructure hosting the distributed management strategies must be available.

An energy management gateway is a low cost low price computing device capable of hosting many energy related applications.
This platform provides an abstract view of resources to applications. Resources are either the building itself or in-building appliances. Applications interact with the building users through a device independent web interface (smartphone, tablet, PC…).
A building controller application can then manage appliances (heat pump, boiler, in-feed inverter, …) through their corresponding resources.

In this context, the goals of the project are:

to define appropriate models abstracting the behavior of distributed energy resources and buildings so that controllers can interface them in a homogeneous way;
to develop an energy management gateway core system using embedded virtualization technology to provide high secure access to resources;
to design and prototype solutions linking the existing building infrastructure and the corresponding resources hosted in the building energy management gateway, using the Internet of Things technologies.