Smart Buildings and Smart Energy Systems | Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Research Institute for Smart Energy

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Smart buildings can automatically respond and adopt to the changing operation conditions and the changing requirements of building users to create a comfortable, healthy, efficient and safe environment in a sustainable manner.

Today’s buildings are not only energy intensive, but also information/data intensive. The massive amount of building data can fuel AI to discover new data-driven knowledge, which is a valuable supplement to existing physics-based domain knowledge about buildings and building energy systems.

An effective synergy of both types of knowledge, supported by advanced control, IT and data science technologies, can bring up a new generation of smart buildings, which are smarter to handle the increasingly complicated interactions among buildings, occupants, environment and power grids. A higher degree of integrated distributed intelligence can be achieved in smart buildings which facilities the smart energy and environment management from the field/edge level using technologies, such as IoT, to the building level in a server or cloud.

This focus area assembles a strong multidisciplinary team to develop advanced building sensing and networking, data analytics, optimization, control and diagnosis methods and technologies to facilitate the building industry’s transitions in the era of pervasive big data and AI.

Major Ongoing Projects

Development of Next-generation Key Technologies for Smart Buildings

RGC Collaborative Research Fund (CRF), (C5018-20G), PC: Prof. Shengwei Wang, HK$ 6,140,000, June/2021-June/2024.

Project outline:

On the basis of emerging information technology, data science and distributed real-time optimisation, this project will adopt an interdisciplinary approach to advance building automation technologies for next-generation smart buildings by means of energy system real-time control optimisation and diagnosis as well as IoT-enabled building automation.

It will develop advanced technologies and engineering tools that define the next generation of smart buildings, tapping into the potential of a major increase in energy efficiency and distributed intelligence.

Development of Smart Energy Management Technologies for Complex Building Energy Systems in High-Density Cities

National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFE0107400), Ministry of Science and Technology of China, PC: Prof. Fu Xiao, RMB4,120,000, July/2021-June/2024.

Project outline:

The development of high-density cities poses major energy and environmental challenges. With urbanization, buildings have increasingly become larger and more complex. This project assembles an international multidisciplinary team of experts from PolyU, Technical University of Denmark, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Midea Group to develop innovative AI-enabled data-driven modelling, prediction, control and fault diagnosis technologies to improve energy efficiency, flexibility, reliability and sustainability of building and district energy systems.

This project will demonstrate and test the cloud-based deployment of the technologies in Hong Kong, Fo Shan, Shanghai, and Copenhagen.