I-WE

Internet of Things (IoT) and home automation are of paramount importance today to ensure the environmental sustainability of buildings during their operation. The merging of home automation with controllable building systems is still an open challenge with a very high potential to improve the comfort conditions of buildings while reducing their energy consumption. In fact, by using dynamic and controllable systems, buildings can adapt to constantly changing external and internal boundary conditions, and also make use of natural resources (e.g. making the most of solar radiation as daylight and as a heating source). Home automation technologies have already reached a high level of maturity; for example, solar shading systems, artificial lighting, heating and cooling systems are increasingly "smart", often meaning that they can be remotely controlled or even managed by simple controllers. However, these systems often operate independently of each other, resulting in suboptimal behavior of the building system as a whole: each subsystem behaves according to its own "optimum", but the sum of these does not result in an optimized overall system.This research project aims to interconnect a "smart window" system with other building systems, to make them work together with the goal of guaranteeing high user satisfaction and energy performance. Special attention was given to the control approach of the shading system, resulting in a more flexible control strategy. In addition, links have been established between different building systems: the opening/closing of windows, which affects both thermal comfort and indoor air quality; the heating and cooling system, particularly with regard to its setpoint temperature; and the lighting system, which can work together with the shading system to provide the best visual comfort.