Energy Management in Smart Buildings and Homes: Current Approaches, a Hypothetical Solution, and Open Issues and Challenges

Abstract

Energy plays a pivotal role for economic development of a country. A reliable energy source is needed to improve the living standards of people. To achieve such a goal, governments and industries are trying to install a new energy infrastructure called the "Smart Grid". This helps to manage the electricity generation and distribution in an efficient manner. Buildings and other structures are the biggest consumers of electricity. There is a need to reduce the energy consumption so that the resources can be utilized efficiently. Therefore, in this paper, we give a comprehensive state-of-the-art on various recent techniques and solutions which provide energy savings in smart homes and buildings. This includes statistical models, cloud computing based solutions, fog computing and smart metering based architectures, and several other IoT (internet of things) inspired solutions. We also present a hypothetical model that treats energy supply and usage in buildings as a self-managing energy system (SES). This paper is concluded by highlighting several open issues and challenges related to energy management in buildings.INDEX TERMS Energy Management, Smart Buildings and Homes.

Intelligent Energy Management Systems -- A Review

“…Furthermore, they discussed about dominant scheduling methodologies which are grouped into five categories. Additional energy saving techniques are presented by Mir et al (2021), including statistical models, cloud computingbased solutions, fog computing, smart-metering-based architectures and also some IoT inspired solutions. Beaudin and Zareipour (2015) reviewed methods employed to model various aspects of residential energy management systems.…”

“…Year Description Mir et al (2021) 2021 State-of-the-art solutions for energy management Himeur et al (2021) 2021 Analysis of recommendation systems for energy efficiency in buildings Dunne et al (2021) 2021 Overview of the field of Ambient Intelligence Ali et al (2021) 2021 Compilation of latest developments and research orientations on intelligent energy management Leitao et al (2020) 2020 State of the art review of energy management systems in residential buildings McIlvennie et al (2020) 2020 Discussion between techno-centric and user-centric approaches on energy management systems Cattaneo (2019) 2019 Discussion on barriers to the adoption of technologies for energy efficiency Sardianos, Varlamis, Dimitrakopoulos, et al (2019) 2019 Users' micro-moments as influential factors of energy consumption behaviors Becchio et al (2018) 2018 Importance of altering users' behavior Boodi et al (2018) 2018 Review on building energy management systems focusing on three model types Shareef et al (2018) 2018 Review of demand response techniques, smart technologies and scheduling controllers González-Briones, De La 2018 Multi-agent systems as modelling tools for energy optimization applications Lin et al (2017) 2017 Overview on various aspects of Internet of Things systems Beaudin and Zareipour (2015) 2015 Analysis of methods for modeling home energy management systems De Paola et al (2014) 2014 Presentation of architectural, technological and algorithmic aspects of intelligent energy management systems Asare- Bediako et al (2013) 2013 Proposal of multi-agent architectures for energy management Park et al (2012) 2012 Review on trending topics of recommendation systems 2018) conducted a research on performance gaps in energy consumption, revealing that recent buildings, constructed with modern materials, consume less energy than recently renovated older buildings. Furthermore, a difference between actual and theoretical (simulated) consumption was also noticed.…”

“…Expanding intelligent management of energy in the context of smart cities, indicates that smart systems should have the ability to be extended with various heterogeneous devices. Therefore, flexible layered architectures are necessary (Khajenasiri, Estebsari, Verhelst, and Gielen (2017)) because non-scalable IEMS will be unreliable in the future (Mir et al (2021)).…”

“…These environments play an important role in the Smart Grid. Smart grids consist of two parts, the supply-side and the demand-side, which optimize the energy production, transmission, distribution and consumption (Mir, Abbasi, Mir, Kanwal, and Alamri (2021)). Smart homes are a necessity for the demandside of these grids because even if the supply-side is successfully optimized, a faulty demand-side, e.g.…”

Likelihood of Reaching Zero Energy Building Design in Hot Dry Climate: Saudi Arabia

“…The ZEBs have proved a viable means of improving efficiency and reducing the environmental impact of buildings, thus contributing to sustainable development in the building sector [14], [19]. The design of ZEB projects needs to be adapted to local climate conditions and address the factors of energy management into building systems [20]. Alwetaishi [21] experimentally explored the construction techniques used in the heritage building, such as the utilization of thermal mass and natural ventilation, to achieve the ZEB.…”