Platform architecture and data management for cloud-based buildings energy self-assessment and optimization

Abstract

Energy consumption in the EU has been increasing at an astonishing rate in the recent years. The European Commission has decided counteract on energy consumed by buildings, which is one of the areas that has contributed more to this increase. More than 40% of energy consumed in the EU is currently spent in buildings, whereas more than 75% of buildings in this region are not energy efficient. The SATO project addresses these challenges by providing self-assessments towards optimization (SATO) of energy and comfort management in residential and service buildings from multiple partners. This thesis focuses on specific contributions in the design, development, deployment, and evaluation of a first prototype of the cloud-based platform being proposed by this project. More specifically, this thesis contributed to the design of a middleware component that connects the buildings to the platform and streams events from devices to where data is processed. The activities included exploring proprietary and open-source specialized platforms for Internet of Things (IoT), general-purpose streaming platforms, among others. The acquired knowledge on these topics enabled us to design a platform architecture that integrated our components with the ones from other frameworks developed in the SATO project. Additionally, the systematic deployment of the SATO platform is another contribution from this thesis that helped the project to deal with the cumbersome complexity of this type of platforms. Finally, this thesis identified some appropriate component placement strategies for the SATO platform, optimized and scaled up many of its components, and evaluated its first prototype to reach a throughput of up to 60 thousand messages (of 500 bytes each) per second.