Qatar Green Schools Initiative: Energy Management System with Cost-Efficient and Lightweight Networked IoT

With the growing need of developing real-time energy management and automation systems, building energy efficiency is of large focus in recent research. In particular, school buildings require special attention to occupants' comfort and behavioral patterns related to the power consumed by heavy functional electrical systems. This paper introduces an Energy Management System (EMS) for schools using cost-efficient Internet of Things (IoT) units. The basis of such a platform is networked IoT sensing units, of which as compared to existing solutions, they are convenient and cost-efficient for large-scale IoT deployments. The proposed school's EMS platform features four main layers (described bottom-up): 1) scalable deployment of the environment-sensing unit, and the smart meter unit. The units compute electric parameters and energy profiles of the connected appliances/switchboard circuits, in addition to the environmental parameters; 2) sensor communication networks in restricted physical zones; 3) live and historical data monitoring and analysis at the cloud; and 4) remote real-time control of the connected circuits/appliances for efficient energy consumption and management. While being highly cost-efficient and energy efficient, the implemented IoT sensing units show measured-data credibility on lightweight and computationally constrained resources, and are designed to be noninvasive for convenient commercialized deployments. The proposed system is planned to be integrated with the external smart grid network as well as renewable energy production systems.