Comfort as a Service: A New Paradigm for Residential Environmental Quality Control

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of Comfort as a Service (CaaS), a new energy supply paradigm for providing comfort to residential customers. CaaS takes into account the available passive and active elements, the external factors that affect energy consumption and associated costs, and occupants’ behaviors to generate optimal control strategies for the domestic equipment automatically. As a consequence, it releases building occupants from operating the equipment, which gives rise to a disruption of the traditional model of paying per consumed energy in favor of a model of paying per provided comfort. In the paper, we envision a realization of CaaS based on several technologies such as ambient intelligence, big data, cloud computing and predictive computing. We discuss the opportunities and the barriers of CaaS-centered business and exemplify the potential of CaaS deployments by quantifying the expected energy savings achieved after limiting occupants’ control over the air conditioning system in a test scenario.

Management Challenges and Opportunities for Energy Cloud Development and Diffusion

“…While the cloud platform makes it possible to externalize all measurements, store, analyze, and prepare data for other functions [48], there is a need to improve infrastructure and computational power of installations that fit this layer [32]. These improvements should also lead to lower energy consumption [10,51,[102][103][104][105][106], and also decrease maintenance costs [52,102,103,105,106]. Other technological challenges cited by the authors that can contribute to the improvement of activities related to the cloud are the improvement of data collection and acquisition, and scheduling tasks to reduce data traffic in the cloud [16,98,107], increase storage capacity, increase the number of users connected [29,108], reduce cloud saturation bottlenecks [33,53,59,60,69,72,98], improve data processing algorithms [33,46,63], decrease server failures and loss of user data [29,63], and integrate distributed data storage systems [16,63].…”

“…The definition of which data should be sent to the cloud directly interferes in the service layer, as it is based on the available data that statistical analysis on production, consumption, forecasts, and other analyses related to energy are carried out [102,109,110], which shows the importance of integrating the activities of different layers. Because of all these data-related tasks, there is a need for implementation of improvements in the data pre-processing stage, such as the standardization of attributes and data format [12,46,48], which can directly contribute to the data processing time [19,46].…”

RoomFort: An Ontology-Based Comfort Management Application for Hotels

“…As RoomFort aims at providing guest-based comfort for some indoor metrics, a novel paradigm for indoor comfort management has starting to spread: Comfort as a Service (CaaS). In a recent research paper, Juan Gómez-Romero et al [81] suggest that dwellers should hand over the control of their comfort-management systems to a energy-savings companies. The purpose of this action aims at generating an automatic optimal control strategy for the indoor domestic equipment, able to provide the inhabitants with adequate comfort levels while ensuring energy-savings.…”

“…Moreover, CaaS approach releases building occupants from operating with the comfort equipment, which usually generates energy wasting, uncomfortable indoor comfort and an increase in costs. The idea suggested in [81] turns the traditional model of paying per consumed energy in favor of a model of paying per provided comfort, thus, making comfort a service.…”

A Visual and Persuasive Energy Conservation System Based on BIM and IoT Technology

“…Therefore, some scholars attempt to use IoT (Internet of Things) technology to collect basic environmental information of the locations of individual projects for monitoring the architectural space environment of different projects in a more precise way, even control the environmental equipment via IoT [7]. In this context, recent developments in BEMS are focusing on smart technologies to address the gap between energy consumption and occupants' comfort [8,9]. Additionally, a multi-dimensional environment also exists that integrates a BIM model as a platform for presenting terminal information and model construction [10][11][12][13] to enhance the visual effect of monitoring results.…”