Improved occupancy-based solutions for energy saving in buildings

In the past decades, despite the huge interest for the topics related to energy conservation and reducing the CO2 emissions, it became obvious that there is an economic reason for the weak progress in these fields: the visible correlation between the economic growth and the energy consumption. As a result, it is very likely that the demand for energy will continue to grow. Since buildings are responsible for 40% of the total energy demand, in this paper we review the vast literature dedicated to energy saving in buildings from the perspective of the feasibility on a large scale. We emphasize the solutions based on detecting and forecasting the building occupancy in order to control the HVAC and lighting systems for energy saving without affecting the comfort of the users. Several improvements of these solutions are proposed.