PerOMAS: Personal Office Management and Automation System

The reduction of the consumption of energy, through its efficient use, is regarded as one of the ways of reducing the impact of mankind on the environment. Buildings consume a significant amount of energy, namely for heating, cooling and illumination. Over the last decades, more energy efficient equipment, new building materials and construction techniques have enabled more energy efficient buildings. However, human behaviour has a large impact on the energy consumption of each building, with similar buildings presenting very distinct energy footprints, due to their occupants´ behaviour. The problem of creating more sustainable energy consumption habits has recently received a lot of attention from the research community. Systems capable of reducing energy consumption, by enforcing more correct behaviours, may reduce costs for companies and help improve the environmental outlook. This paper proposes a novel system to address the energy consumption problem and inadequate habits of people in office buildings. It´s a highly flexible distributed office management system that can scale from an individual node in an office to the whole building. The goal is to reduce global building energy consumption without significantly affecting the users´ comfort level. An approach is used where the building services are adjusted to its occupancy level and users´ needs based on their location. Users are driven to better energy usage habits through access to information and feedback. Our proposal is presented in detail and validated in the context of an academic institution, more specifically at the Taguspark campus of Instituto Superior Técnico. The developed system is now operational and being used as a flexible, easily programmable, research platform.