On How to Design Smart Energy-Efficient Buildings

Smart spaces are environments such as apartments, offices, museums, hospitals, schools, malls, university campuses, and outdoor areas that are enabled for the cooperation of objects (e.g., sensors, devices, appliances) and systems that have the capability to self-organize themselves, based on given policies. Since they can be used for an efficient management of the energy consumption of buildings, there is a growing interest for them, both in academia and industry. Unfortunately, nowadays, these systems are still designed manually with ad-hoc solutions. As a consequence, a huge effort has to be spent for each new smart building. Within this context, aim of this work is to propose a methodology to automate the design process of such smart spaces. The paper presents an overview of the design flow implemented to support the design of scalable architectures for energy aware smart spaces.