Smart Meeting Room Usage Information and Prediction by Modelling Occupancy Profiles

Abstract

The monitoring of small houses and rooms has become possible due to the advances in IoT sensors, actuators and low power communication protocols in the last few years. As buildings are one of the biggest energy consuming entities, monitoring them has great interest for trying to avoid non-necessary energy waste. Moreover, human behaviour has been reported as being the main discrepancy source between energy usage simulations and real usage, so the ability to monitor and predict actions as opening windows, using rooms, etc. is gaining attention to develop stronger models which may lead to reduce the overall energy consumption of buildings, considering buildings thermal inertia and additional capabilities. In this paper, a case study is described in which four meeting rooms have been monitored to obtain information about the usage of the rooms and later use it to predict their future usage. The results show the possibility to deploy a simple and non-intrusive sensing system whose output could be used to develop advanced control strategies.

Application of Internet of Things in academic buildings for space use efficiency using occupancy and booking data

“…This allows to send alert emails when the lecture halls are booked but not occupied and, as suggested by Ref. [ 36 ], cancel the bookings automatically.…”

“…The potential for hoteling-style office can be examined by calculating the minimum ratio of work stations to employees so that, e.g., only 1% of the time, there would be an insufficient number of workstations [ 34 ]. Another example is devising a system to cancel unused bookings in meeting rooms by contrasting the bookings with real usage [ 36 ]. This approach is partly applied to our investigation of lecture hall usage.…”

“…Online booking systems are primarily intended to support the academic activities being organized while they can be used to predict space use [ 7 ]. Moreover, this information can be cross-verified by linking the booking systems to sensor technologies to measure the actual usage of spaces [ 7 , 36 ]. Occupancy sensing technologies provide information that enables space use measurement and management.…”

Towards a smart campus: supporting campus decisions with Internet of Things applications

“…Furthermore, a significant number of papers make use of multiple sensing methods. In applications that optimize building services, researchers make use of sensors that measure aspects of the indoor environment, such as temperature, CO 2 , luminance, humidity, acoustics (Ekwevugbe et al, 2017;Ioannidis et al, 2017;Saralegui et al, 2019;Schwee et al, 2019). In two recent studies, these are combined with the collection of user feedback (Dave et al, 2018;Romero Herrera et al, 2018).…”

Effects of Positioning of Multi-Sensor Devices on Occupancy and Indoor Environmental Monitoring in Single-Occupant Offices

“…The trend of integrating multiple sensors in a single device can be observed in the emerging applications of IoT in various areas other than building monitoring, such as weather stations, parking monitoring, and military applications [23]. As the applications for occupancy and indoor environmental monitoring develop, it is becoming more common to use multi-sensor devices in recent studies related to buildings [24,25].…”