Abstract

Automated building energy management systems are es-sential to enabling the development of mass-market, low-energy buildings. In existing and future buildings, the im-pacts of occupant behaviors contribute significantly to the total energy efficiency. As building technologies and materi-als improve, the relative impact of behavioral factors is more significant. We propose a general framework where building systems can share information in order to optimize perfor-mance. To be successful, such a system must be respon-sive, intuitive, robust, and scalable. As a first step toward achieving these goals, we present a prototype distributed control system for building energy management that uses wireless sensor network-class nodes. Using protocol inde-pendent multicast, sensors and controllers are allowed to ef-ficiently share information in a distributed peer-to-peer fash-ion. Our prototype system achieved an energy savings of 7.1 %- 14.6 % by implementing a relatively simple control policy. Based on the results of this this work we have identi-fied three key areas for future work.