Do-it-yourself, low-cost building monitoring system

Monitoring systems are essential for the energy-efficient and comfortable operation of buildings. However, today's monitoring solutions are relatively expensive in terms of purchase, installation, and maintenance. At the same time, there is a need for low-cost monitoring systems, especially for smaller buildings. To address this need, a novel do-it-yourself, low-cost building monitoring system based on open technologies has been developed. The system is intended to be assembled and put into operation by laymen in accordance with given instructions. Accordingly, all work stages must be simple and obvious. This paper describes the low-cost monitoring system and its prototype implementation.

Modular Software Architecture for Local Smart Building Servers

This paper presented the architecture and construction of a novel smart building system that could monitor and control buildings’ use in a safe and optimal way. The system operates on a Raspberry local server, which could be connected via the cloud technology to a central platform. The local system includes nine modules that inter-communicate. The system detects sensor faults, and provides a friendly interface to occupants. The paper presented the software architecture IoT used for the building monitoring and the use of this system for the management of fifteen social housing units during a year. The system allowed the investigation of indoor comfort and both energy and hot water consumptions. Data analysis resulted in the detection of abnormal energy consumptions. The system could be easily used in buildings’ management. It works in a plug-and-play mode.

IoT Sensor Networks in Smart Buildings: A Performance Assessment Using Queuing Models

Smart buildings in big cities are now equipped with an internet of things (IoT) infrastructure to constantly monitor different aspects of people’s daily lives via IoT devices and sensor networks. The malfunction and low quality of service (QoS) of such devices and networks can severely cause property damage and perhaps loss of life. Therefore, it is important to quantify different metrics related to the operational performance of the systems that make up such computational architecture even in advance of the building construction. Previous studies used analytical models considering different aspects to assess the performance of building monitoring systems. However, some critical points are still missing in the literature, such as (i) analyzing the capacity of computational resources adequate to the data demand, (ii) representing the number of cores per machine, and (iii) the clustering of sensors by location. This work proposes a queuing network based message exchange architecture to evaluate the performance of an intelligent building infrastructure associated with multiple processing layers: edge and fog. We consider an architecture of a building that has several floors and several rooms in each of them, where all rooms are equipped with sensors and an edge device. A comprehensive sensitivity analysis of the model was performed using the Design of Experiments (DoE) method to identify bottlenecks in the proposal. A series of case studies were conducted based on the DoE results. The DoE results allowed us to conclude, for example, that the number of cores can have more impact on the response time than the number of nodes. Simulations of scenarios defined through DoE allow observing the behavior of the following metrics: average response time, resource utilization rate, flow rate, discard rate, and the number of messages in the system. Three scenarios were explored: (i) scenario A (varying the number of cores), (ii) scenario B (varying the number of fog nodes), and (iii) scenario C (varying the nodes and cores simultaneously). Depending on the number of resources (nodes or cores), the system can become so overloaded that no new requests are supported. The queuing network based message exchange architecture and the analyses carried out can help system designers optimize their computational architectures before building construction.

Application of Low-Cost Sensors for Building Monitoring: A Systematic Literature Review

In recent years, many scholars have dedicated their research to the development of low-cost sensors for monitoring of various parameters. Despite their high number of applications, the state of the art related to low-cost sensors in building monitoring has not been addressed. To fill this gap, this article presents a systematic review, following well-established methodology, to analyze the state of the art in two aspects of structural and indoor parameters of buildings, in the SCOPUS database. This analysis allows to illustrate the potential uses of low-cost sensors in the building sector and addresses the scholars the preferred communication protocols and the most common microcontrollers for installation of low-cost monitoring systems. In addition, special attention is paid to describe different areas of the two mentioned fields of building monitoring and the most crucial parameters to be monitored in buildings. Finally, the deficiencies in line with limited number of studies carried out in various fields of building monitoring are overviewed and a series of parameters that ought to be studied in the future are proposed.

Geodetic monitoring of deformations of engineering structures

Unfortunately, all kinds of anthropogenic and natural factors contribute to the deformation of man-made structures. Geodetic control of buildings and structures, timely detection and elimination of deformations is a guarantee of long-term operation of the building. Monitoring is one of the most important tools to ensure the reliability and safety of multi-storey and large-scale buildings and structures during construction and operation. A significant amount of instrumental control during construction and operation is carried out by geodetic methods. Geodetic methods are used to determine both local and general deformations of buildings and structures, deviations of load-bearing, fencing structures from vertical and design drawings, foundations and soil settlements, through which the technical condition of the building or structure is specially assessed. Today, the analysis of deformations is an important task for every region of our country, especially for areas with changes in the earth's surface. The field of deformation research in the Republic of Kazakhstan is quite developed and there are many necessary materials to identify such changes. In our country, special services are organized to control any benchmarks and analyze the results of high-precision measurements in several cycles to detect any changes on the earth's surface. Therefore, this article provides an overview of both the classical methods of geodetic control and the tools and technologies used to determine the quantitative characteristics of the deformation of engineering objects.

Design and Implementation of a Wireless Sensor Network for Seismic Monitoring of Buildings

This article presents a new wireless seismic sensor network system, especially design for building monitoring. The designed prototype allows remote control, and remote and real-time monitoring of the recorded signals by any internet browser. The system is formed by several Nodes (based on the CC3200 microcontroller of Texas Instruments), which are in charge of digitizing the ambient vibrations registered by three-component seismic sensors and transmitting them to a central server. This server records all the received signals, but also allows their real-time visualization in several remote client browsers thanks to the JavaScript’s Node.js technology. The data transmission uses not only Wi-Fi technology, but also the existing network resources that nowadays can be found usually in any official or residential building (lowering deployment costs). A data synchronization scheme was also implemented to correct the time differences between the Nodes, but also the long-term drifts found in the internal clock of the microcontrollers (improving the quality of records). The completed system is a low-cost, open-hardware and open-software design. The prototype was tested in a real building, recording ambient vibrations in several floors and observing the differences due to the building structure.

Smart contracts for automated control system in Blockchain based smart cities

Nowadays, smart applications are increasing day by day to improve the standard of living in smart cities. A modern-day smart city is characterized by the presence of numerous smart Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-enabled services such as automated healthcare, automatic building monitoring, home automation, smart parking, traffic management, data security, among others. Such cities employ multitudes of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to collect and share data between trusted users by means of a centralized intermediary for monitoring and control of the myriad automatic activities. However, a centralized intermediary is plagued by issues such as single point of failure, risk of data loss, man-in-the-middle attack, and so forth. Blockchain-based smart contracts for automated control in smart cities provide a decentralized and secure alternative. In this paper, an Ethereum based system design for decentralized applications in smart cities has been proposed that enables systems to share data without an intermediary between trusted and non-trusted stakeholders using Ethereum based self-executing contracts. Such contracts allow automated multi-step workflows for smart applications. Two use cases, have been considered namely smart healthcare and smart building monitoring, as proof of stake of the proposed Ethereum based contract. The performance of the proposed scheme for these use cases has been presented with Keccack 256 transaction hash, the total number of transactions, gas consumed by each contract. Such an attempt is a worthwhile addition to state of the art as evident from the results presented herein. The modeling simulation and analysis of hashing power shows that for hashing power greater than 55% the probability of double spending attack reaches to 42% maximum. So it is concluded that the probability of double spending increases with the increase of transaction values.