Buildings consume 40% of Ireland’s total annual energy translating to €3.5 billion (2004). The European Building Performance Directive (effective January 2003) places an onus on all member states to rate the energy performance of all buildings in excess of 50m 2. Intelligent energy and environmental performance management systems for residential buildings do not exist and consist of an ad-hoc integration of wired building management systems and Monitoring & Targeting systems for non-residential buildings. These systems are unsophisticated and do not easily lend themselves to cost effective retrofit or integration with other enterprise management systems.

Within the Enterprise Ireland funded project Buildwise, as part of the WISEN group of projects, Tyndall is collaborating with researchers in the Dept of Civil and Environmental Engineering NUI Galway, Civil and Environmental Engineering University College Cork and the Adaptive Wireless Systems Centre in Cork Institute of Technology to specify, design, and validate a data management technology platform that will support integrated environmental& energy management in buildings utilising a combination of holistic environmental and energy management viewing scenarios, an integrated building information model, data mining methods and technologies and wireless sensor network technologies,.

As a strategic element of the Buildwise Consortium, it has established an Industry Cluster/ User Group composed of companies and organisations involved in the above supply chains to inform the Buildwise research programme and to contribute relevant expertise and/or products for use in the deployment phase of the programme.The cluster is expanding, and currently includes Cylon Controls, Spokesoft, ChipSensors, EI-Electronics and Lightwave.

Contact : Cian O’Mathuna – omathuna@tyndall.ie | webpage

Relevant Projects:

BuildWise - Building a Sustainable Future: Wireless Sensor Networks for Energy and Environment Management in Buildings Management – EI ATRP XXXX http://zuse.ucc.ie/buildwise/

Project Partners

UCC Environmental Research Institute
IRUSE: Informatics Research Unit for Sustainable Engineering

UCC Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
IT in AEC: Chair of Information Technology in AEC

Cork Institute of Technology
Centre for Adaptive Wireless Systems

NEMBES - HEA PRTLI4 funded project on Networked Embedded Systems
http://www.nembes.org/

Project Partners

Cork Institute of Technology (lead), UCC Civil Engineering, UCC Centre for Architectural Education, UCC Computer Science, 4C, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Cork University Hospital, Cork City Council

ITOBO - Information and Communication Technology for Sustainable and Optimised Building Operation. Funding - Science Foundation Ireland (Strategic Research Cluster; 2007 to 2012)  http://zuse.ucc.ie/itobo/

ITOBO has academic partners from UCC and CIT and many Industry partners and associated members. A full list of ITOBO partners can be found here.

Selected Publications

• Marcus Keane, Karsten Menzel, Dirk Pesch, Cian O'Mathuna, Buildwise: Building a Sustainable Future, Wireless Sensor Networks for Energy and Environment Management in Buildings”, 2nd Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks Research in Ireland (WiSen 2007), June 11, 2007, Dublin, Ireland