SEEMPubS

With modern societies’ rising demand for energy, it is increasingly important to use available energy resources as efficiently as possible. Investments in infrastructure such as intelligent grid- and building-management are a prerequisite for the development of energy aware societies.

While solutions to automatic building management exist, they often face the common shortcomings of being non-generic and vendor-dependent. Furthermore, such systems often do not exploit a building’s full energy saving potential or are considered disturbing by end users. In historic and listed buildings it is not even possible to conduct serious changes to existing infrastructures to install sophisticated building management systems.

SEEMPubS – Smart Energy Efficient Middleware for Public Spaces – aims at solving these problems. The project develops a middleware that enables cost-effective integration of heterogeneous technologies into a common intelligent building energy management system. 
The SEEMPubS platform will be applied in public and historic buildings reusing already existing infrastructure where possible and introducing new technologies where necessary.

Fraunhofer FIT is responsible for integrating different technologies (building management systems, sensor/actuator networks, smart meters) into the SEEMPubS platform. Thereto, SEEMPubS employs the LinkSmart middleware to facilitate secure services and applications across heterogeneous devices and subsystems. LinkSmart has been developed under the coordination of Fraunhofer FIT within the European project HYDRA. Within SEEMPubS it will be further developed and extended with energy monitoring and control functionality.

Moreover, Fraunhofer FIT explores innovative interaction techniques to enable transparent communication between end users and intelligent buildings. A public community portal will be developed to allow end users to access the SEEMPubS system and to exchange information with other users.

Fraunhofer FIT also investigates indirect forms of communication, such as Ambient Visualization technologies, to provide to the users contextual information, without demanding their full attention.

The SEEMPubS platform will be evaluated at several facilities of the Technical University of Turin (Politecnico di Torino). Besides various modern buildings, this also includes Castello del Valentino, a 16th century palace and today seat of the faculty of architecture.