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Approach

Buildings account for more than 40% of energy consumption and are the largest CO2 producers in many world regions. Thus, making efficient use of energy in buildings is paramount to conserve energy and reduce greenhouse effects. To date, automated control and adaptation in buildings is often limited to occupant commodity changes of indoor climate depending on room temperature, CO2, and lights operated though motion detectors.


GreenerBuildings aims to realise an integrated solution that addresses the challenge of energy-aware adaptation from basic (energy harvesting) sensors and actuators, up to an embedded software for coordinating thousands of smart objects with the goals of energy saving and user support.

GreenerBuildings will investigate how buildings can dynamically adapt their operations according to actual use, aiming at substantial energy savings.

Our vision is that buil­dings can respond to their actual use and changes in their envi­ronment; interact with their occupants through novel ubi­quitous sen­sing and occupant behaviour inference techniques and that can transparently adapt a building's function and operation. The project embraces the following key principles in order to achieve its goals:

  • living lab experimentation and validation scheme,
  • an agile cross-domain consortium,
  • a spiral development model, and
  • a user centric approach.

In particular, the validation will consider test cases with at least 1.000 devices (sensor and actuator nodes) deployed in living lab buildings. Public buildings, such as offices, universities, hotels, and shops will be considered. With its multi-national consortium, the project’s outreach will go beyond European boarders.