A Prototype Model of Monitoring Energy Consumption and Optimizing Distribution of Smart Buildings

Abstract

Given the upcoming post-pandemic times, there are more universities considering adopting the hybridization model. As such, not all the facilities and building utilities will be fully utilized as only half of the student population will be expected, thus wasting the campus's energy consumption. An intelligent management system can be implemented into smart campuses to reduce the overall electrical bills to adapt to the hybrid education model. The research was then conducted on existing prior work around intelligent buildings and energy optimization. It was found that many of the energy optimization models utilized an IoT application highly specific to the designed IoT system only. This inspired developing an open source generalized IoT application to provide two-way communication between the energy optimization models and IoT devices. This would allow researchers to test their intelligent energy optimization models without building a support application from scratch. During the development phase, Firebase and open-source Chart JS were used to create an interactive web application with features including a dashboard, insightful data analysis, and remote-control features to be applied in a smart campus. A successful connection was established with a Raspberry Pi-based IoT system, where data could be stored and retrieved from the database into the web application. The second phase is going to be implementation of AI model which is currently in progress and being trained to fulfill the required criteria.