Paul Stack

Decision Support for Building Renovation Strategies

The renovation of existing buildings usually involves decision-making processes aiming at reducing energy consumption and building maintenance costs. The goal of this paper is to prioritize what components/systems need to be replaced. It focuses on renovation strategies from the maintenance density and energy consumption point of view. A Decision Support Framework (DSF) was developed for future development of Decision Support System. Data warehousing methodologies were used to extract, store and analyze maintenance data. A Web application was developed to display the frequency of faults and density of maintenance of six distinct buildings at University College Cork (UCC). A generic Decision Support Model (DSM) with six sections was developed, which was implemented to a computerized semi-automatic tool – Decision Support Tool (DST). Integrating the analysis results and the DST, five renovation suggestions were proposed.

Wireless Sensor Network Deployment for Building Environmental Monitoring and Control

It is commonly agreed that a 15-40% reduction of building energy consumption is achievable by efficiently operated buildings when compared with typical practice. Existing research has identified that the level of information available to Building Managers with existing Building Management Systems and Environmental Monitoring Systems (BMS/EMS) is insufficient to perform the required performance based building assessment. The majority of today’s buildings are insufficiently sensored to obtain an unambiguous understanding of performance. The cost of installing additional sensors and meters is extremely high, primarily due to the estimated cost of wiring and the needed labor. From this perspectives wireless sensors technology proves to have a greater cost-efficiency while maintaining high levels of functionality and reliability. In this paper, a wireless sensor network mote hardware design and implementation are introduced for building deployment application. The core of the mote design is based on the 8 bit AVR microcontroller, Atmega1281 and 2.4 GHz wireless communication chip, CC2420. The sensors were selected carefully to meet both the building monitoring and design requirements. Beside the sensing capability, actuation and interfacing to external meters/sensors are provided to perform different management control and data recording tasks. The experiments show that the developed mote works effectively in giving stable data acquisition and owns good communication and power performance.

Design and deployment of a new wireless sensor node platform for building environmental monitoring and control

It is commonly agreed that a 15–40% reduction of building energy consumption is achievable by efficiently operated buildings when compared with typical practice. Existing research has identified that the level of information available to Building Managers with existing Building Management Systems and Environmental Monitoring Systems is insufficient to perform the required performance-based building assessment. The majority of today’s buildings are insufficiently sensored to obtain an unambiguous understanding of performance. The cost of installing additional sensors and meters is extremely high, primarily due to the estimated cost of wiring and the needed labour. From these perspectives wireless sensors technology proves to have a greater cost-efficiency while maintaining high levels of functionality and reliability. In this paper, a wireless sensor network mote hardware design and implementation are introduced particularly for building deployment application. The core of the mote design is based on the 8-bit AVR microcontroller, Atmega1281 and 2.4 GHz wireless communication chip, CC2420. The sensors were selected carefully to meet both the building monitoring and design requirements. Beside the sensing capability, actuation and interfacing to external meters/sensors are provided to perform different management control and data recording tasks.

Novel power management system for energy harvesting in building environment

Nowadays, it can be observed that Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN) are taking increasing vital rolls in many applications such as building energy monitoring and control which is the focus application of the work in this paper. However, the main challenging issue with adopting the WSN technology is the use of power sources with limited life time like batteries. One of the smart solutions that could tackle this problem is using the Energy Harvesting technology. The work in this paper will be focused on harvesting indoor light intensity through proposing of a new power management design. The new approach is inspired by the use of the Fractional Open Circuit Voltage based Maximum Power Point tracking (MPPT) concept for sub mw Photo Voltaic (PV) cells. The new design is adopting two main features: First it minimizes the power consumed by the power management section and second it maximizes the MPPT converted output voltage and consequently improves the efficiency of the power conversion in sub mw power level. The new experimentally tested design showed an improvement of 81 % in the efficiency of MPPT conversion using 0.5 mW input power in comparison with the other presented solutions that showed less efficiency with higher input power.

Heterogeneous Resource Management and Orchestration in Cloud Environments

The addition of heterogeneous resources to conventional homogeneous cloud environments has enabled clouds to embrace a wide variety of new applications that heretofore were traditionally confined to specialized computing environments. The enhanced and extended features offered by heterogeneous resources enable service offerings that pose challenges to traditional cloud management throughout the entire service delivery stack. The accelerated uptake of heterogeneous resources is exacerbating these challenges, which no longer can be efficiently addressed in an ad-hoc manner. Therefore, an integrated approach to heterogeneous resource management that is cognizant of the unique advantages of different hardware types is needed. In this paper, two candidate approaches, a platform-integration scheme and a server-integration scheme, are introduced to address this management challenge. The platform-integration scheme integrates and coordinates the management of various coexisting resource managers and associated environments each of which may be managing resources of different types using the most appropriate resource abstraction method. In contrast, the server-integration scheme provides a single, lower level, fine-grained management mechanism across all hardware resource types. Ultimately, the goal of each schemes is to provide a unified view of resources from a capability perspective to consumers.

Self-Healing in a Decentralised Cloud Management System

With the advent of heterogeneous resources and increasing scale, present cloud environments are becoming more and more complex. In order to manage heterogeneous cloud infrastructures at scale, in a reliable and robust manner, systems and services with autonomic behaviours are advantaging. In this paper, self-healing concepts are introduced for autonomic cloud management. A layered master-slave structure is proposed, providing the reliability and high availability for a decentralised, hierarchical cloud architecture.