IoT for the users: Thermal comfort and cost saving

Interconnection of objects via the Internet of Things (IoT) is playing a key role in tackling problems related to energy consumption, which affect environment and sustainability. In particular over 30% of the global energy consumption resides in Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) usage inside buildings. Usage awareness and efficient management of HVAC have the potential to significantly reduce related costs. Nevertheless, strict saving policies may contrast with users' comfort: people will accept changes in their habits only if these changes do not affect their comfort. This paper proposes a smart system consisting of 5 HVAC distributed over 5 rooms and a solar photovoltaic farm. The goal of the system is to propose a user-centric approach, which is able to find the most appropriate working times for the 5 HVAC systems so to have a trade-off between the thermal comfort for all the users in the rooms and its related cost, taking into account information inferred from the context, such as room occupancy and external temperature. The system is based on the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm to augment real world objects with a virtual counterpart that leverages social consciousness to interact with other objects. Experimental results show how the implemented system is able to learn users' habits and to allow significant financial savings without sacrificing user comfort.