Cooperation 2011 - ECOBUILDING Grant

HYPERTECH Energy Labs have been awarded a major R&D contract from the Hellenic General Secretariat for Research and Technology (Project Acronym: ECOBUILDING), as part of a consortium comprised of renowned industrial and research partners like CERTH-ITI, PRISMA, TERNA, Atlantis Engineering, KLEEMANN, Euromedica and the Centre for Renewable Energy and Savings.

HYPERTECH Energy Labs have been awarded a major R&D contract from the Hellenic General Secretariat for Research and Technology (Project Acronym: ECOBUILDING), as part of a consortium comprised of renowned industrial and research partners like CERTH-ITI, PRISMA, TERNA, Atlantis Engineering, KLEEMANN, Euromedica and the Centre for Renewable Energy and Savings.

The ECOBUILDING project starting date is the 15th of October 2013, its duration is 24 months and its total budget approaches 1,9M€.

The ECOBUILDING project will research and develop a highly novel energy-saving integrated system that aims to reduce the energy consumption and carbon emissions in enterprise buildings by incorporating in the operational phase of a building, a modular, extendable and non-intrusive smart sensor system (consisting of heterogeneous wireless sensors and devices) and will provide an effective mechanism for determining and predicting occupancy in critical building zones towards optimal adaptation of building assets to the overall enterprise energy needs. To this end, the project will deliver an integrated building automation system that will be capable to effectively and efficiently monitor the occupant behavior in order to create intelligent energy profiles (generalized and personalized). Moreover, ECOBUILDING will allow inherently the optimum alignment of building energy needs on occupant operations related to both primary business-related and individual preferences taking into account end-user comfort. The proposed framework will investigate the use of novel algorithms for analyzing and extracting building dynamic behavior through its occupancy in various zones and levels based on the combination of low-cost infrared and other smart metering sensors (e.g. RFID, movement sensors, etc.) that will enable optimal generalized and individual energy profiles based on the investigation of the most important business-related primary activities.

Furthermore, the proposed project will address the lack of energy-awareness tools for both building managers and occupants by designing and delivering a fully interactional framework that provides incentives for improved energy saving behavior. To cope with this need, various visualization tools will be designed and developed for both types of building stakeholders, i.e. occupants and building managers. Building managers tools, known as Building Management Systems (BMS), will be enhanced using Visual Analytics technologies to better detect and analyze potential sources of high energy consumption in their building zones, whereas use of personalized web-based services for building occupants will be delivered mainly through monitors (e.g. tablet devices integrated in the building environment) and/or mobile devices (e.g. PDAs). In both cases, the proposed innovative framework will allow each building user, including the facility managers to adapt during building operation its energy performance by providing optimal balance among consumption, business performance and occupants comfort level.