Smart Buildings, IEEE Robotics and Automation Technical Committee on
Buildings contribute a significant part in the energy consumption in many developed and developing countries. For example, on annual basis buildings consume about 40% of the energy and 70% of the electricity in the United States. In China, the energy consumption in buildings has risen from 10% to 25% of the overall energy consumption of the country since 1978, and is predicted to be 35% increase every year in the coming years.
Buildings are fundamental components of smart cities and smart grids, and they also need to be smart and sustainable. Smart buildings are complex dynamical systems, which comprise a large number of increasingly “active” energy subsystems, which can generate, compute and communicate, and where different energy sectors can interact. Furthermore, building energy use depends on diverse factors, such as the occupancy behavior, the outdoor environment, the structure and building materials. Control and automation, as well as data, are essential for smartening the buildings, and enabling a wider, more sophisticated range of smart methods and innovative schemes, to facilitate local management of demand and generation, and the design of innovative energy management systems. These energy management systems need also to incorporate the user into the design and thus be responsive to their occupants in order to improve their comfort.
Thus building energy management and control is by nature a cross-disciplinary research, and requires the use of methods and techniques from multiple fields (e.g., control, power and energy, computer science, social science). It is the purpose of this technical committee to promote research in this area, to build the strong connection between smart building control and automation with the RAS society.
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