Internet of Things for Green Building Management: Disruptive Innovations Through Low-Cost Sensor Technology and Artificial Intelligence

Buildings consume 60% of global electricity. However, current building management systems (BMSs) are highly expensive and difficult to justify for small-to medium-sized buildings. The Internet of Things (IoT), which can collect and monitor a large amount of data on different aspects of a building and feed the data to the BMS's processor, provides a new opportunity to integrate intelligence into the BMS for monitoring and managing a building's energy consumption to reduce costs. Although an extensive literature is available on, separately, IoT-based BMSs and applications of signal processing techniques for some building energy-management tasks, a detailed study of their integration to address the overall BMS is limited. As such, this article will address the current gap by providing an overview of an IoT-based BMS that leverages signal processing and machine-learning techniques. We demonstrate how to extract high-level building occupancy information through simple, low-cost IoT sensors and study how human activities impact a building's energy use-information that can be exploited to design energy conservation measures that reduce the building's energy consumption.