Comfort Management System for Smart Buildings: An Open-Source Scalable Prototype

Present-day buildings are designed to be occupant-centric- they predominantly focus on occupants' comfort, health, safety and productivity. Maximising occupant comfort while managing energy costs are the important aspects of smart buildings. Industry and academia have largely contributed towards the development of comfort management systems for buildings. The solutions thus provided are mostly proprietary and/or expensive. They may not be easily adaptable to changes that arise due to the demographic factors and location of the building. Furthermore, the inflexibility of these solutions might not allow retrofitting. With these challenges at hand, it becomes important to investigate the design and development of easily adaptable, scalable and low-cost solutions using open-source platforms available today. In this paper, an architecture of a prototype for a comfort management system is presented, using the open-source Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK) stack. A practical case study of thermal comfort management, based on an existing theoretical budget-constrained model, has been explained. Discussion on extension of the system to accommodate other comfort dimensions has also been included.