Remote Building Monitoring and Operations Project Home Page

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Scope

This project is intended to develop a prototype system which would permit remote monitoring and control of multiple commercial buildings across the Internet from a single control center. Such a system would be used by owner/operators of multiple buildings, such a school districts, governments, universities, large retailers, utility companies, building management firms, et al.

We anticipate that such a system would reduce the costs of building monitoring and control and thereby permit more extensive monitoring and control of building HVAC and lighting systems. We estimate that this will generate improvements in building energy efficiency of 15 percent on average. Such savings come from reducing energy waste from equipment that runs when it does not need to, set point optimizations, and correcting operations and control deficiencies. At present many of these opportunities are overlooked to due to lack of sufficient trained staff at the buildings.

The project includes the following components.

• An Internet-to-building-EMCS (Energy Management Control System) gateway which speaks CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) protocol atop TCP/IP on the Internet side and either (preferably) BACnet atop TCP/IP, or a proprietary EMCS communications protocol, to the building EMCS.

• Development of applications-level object specifications for HVAC objects, e.g., chillers.

• A remote building monitoring and control center (RBMCC) which will provide data visualization, database management, building energy simulation, and energy usage analysis tools.

• Deployment and testing of the system in multiple buildings with diverse types of EMCS systems. Our goal is to assess scalability of the system to large numbers of buildings, both in terms of performance and accommodating heterogeneity of control systems and HVAC systems.

• Remote control of HVAC systems - this awaits the availability of a secure CORBA implementation.

Job Openings Revised 8/5/97

Principal Investigators and Project Staff Revised 3/11/98

Licensing and Intellectual Property Revised 8/13/98

Collaborators

Project Status Revised 7/22/97

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Revised 7/29/97

A discussion of the design choices of the project and the rationale behind the various design decisions. Also discusses many problems we have encountered.

Publications

Collaboration Opportunities

Internal UC (LBL/UCB) documents

Access restricted to LBL staff, UC Dept. of Facilities Mgt. staff, and UCB Collaborators

Internal LBL documents

Access restricted to LBL staff.

Related Web Pages

Funding

The project is funded by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Assistant Secretary for Energy Research, Office of Computational and Technology Sciences, Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division beginning August 1995 through the end of FY 97 (Sept. 30, 1997)

It is part of the Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications Program . All efforts funded by the programs can be found at the IITA Funded Efforts page .

The RFP for the program which funded this project can found at this location .

DOE Program Manager

• Mary Anne Scott, U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Computational and Technology Sciences Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division, Program Manager for NII and Energy Demand Mgt., at DOE Headquarters in Germantown, MD. Her address: Mary Anne Scott, Energy Research ER-30, U.S. Dept. of Energy, Internet: scott@er.doe.gov , Phone: (301) 903-6368, Fax: (301) 903-7774