Today's buildings are responsible for more than 40% of the world's total energy consumption. Current systems that manage equipment in buildings fail to reduce unnecessary energy consumption while at the same time maintaining the comfort of those using the buildings. This is usually because the existing systems cannot cope with the changes caused by interactions between people and the building environment. Furthermore, people using buildings are not sufficiently aware of how much buildings consume and of what concrete actions could help to reduce this consumption. Moreover, current building management systems do not take into account feedback from building users and their preferences regarding the conditions in their working environment. We designed and implemented a smart energy system to overcome these gaps. Our system took into account the behavior of building users so as to provide automated control of energy consumption and other processes within an actual building. With this system we also provided user dashboards to serve as a means of communication between the building and its users. In addition to reducing energy consumption we also introduced related optimizations such as reduction of water consumption and improvement of waste management, using the same system principles. We installed a prototype of this system in a modern university building, the Bernoulliborg, to show how such a system is realizable in actual working office space. This building served as the evaluation platform for our research.
About the Author: Faris Nizamic was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1985. In 2009 he graduated as engineer of electrical engineering at the Department for Computer Science and Informatics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Sarajevo. During his studies, he founded a Local Committee of Electrical Engineering Students' European Association in Sarajevo. After obtaining his engineering diploma, he worked for two years in the software development industry. In the fall of 2011, Faris moved to Groningen, The Netherlands, to pursue his PhD in Computer Science. As part of a Distributed Systems research group at the University of Groningen he specialized in the fields of service-oriented systems, software testing, smart energy systems, and sustainability. During his PhD research Faris published several scientific papers, of which one was nominated for the best paper award. He also received two significant Green Mind Award grants for making buildings of the University of Groningen energy-efficient and more sustainable. Moreover, he was awarded with numerous titles for promising start-ups, the most important of which was the Pioneers Community Award 2015.