Sensor Minimization for Energy Management in Smart Buildings

Energy management is one of the critical challenges of smart buildings. This is achieved by sensing the different factors of building. The existing approaches overlook the problems associated with the deployment of a large number of sensors. However, this paper presents a novel and holistic minimum sensor deployment method - an optimization framework to sense different factors for better energy management in buildings. It describes how intelligently using the existing information can lead to a reduction in sensors. The optimization framework is compared with the baseline approach, which deploys sensors at all the locations where they should be sensed, for an existing building. The results indicate that the newly developed optimization framework requires 72.92% less sensors as compared to the baseline approach. This feature makes it an impressive proposition and results in lesser e-waste generation.