Activity profile: Smart Building

Leonardo Business Consulting is a consultancy company that focuses on International Business Development, Project management, Lead Generation, Training and communication.

Leonardo Business consulting is coordinator of ICT PSP proposal “SPEAK”, that aims at developing and implementing an innovative low-cost ICT-based pluggable infrastructure for remote monitoring and control of energy and water consumption in apartments within social housing buildings. In particular, the SPEAK system:

a.     allows monitoring on a real-time, continuous and remote basis tenants’ energy/water consumption data

b.     forwards such data to a central service responsible for ensuring security and privacy, and for processing them in order to:

- short-run: a) inform tenants on a real-time basis about their actual consumption via text message and e-mail and, in general, user friendly interfaces; b) provide them with choices and incentives to impact on their behavior in relation to water/energy use; c) give the social housing operators (SHOs) the opportunity to control and, if necessary, directly act on the buildings both in case of critical situation (major leakages) and for routine management of wiring and pipes systems.

- medium/long run: use the environmental data acquired to detect, via data mining techniques, recurrent patterns useful for setting and addressing direct intervention on the monitored systems.

Leonardo Business Consulting aims to develop new technologies based on the protocol and IEEE standard ZigBee, a former competitor of BlueTooth, which is now gaining momentum in the context of house automation because is far less power hungry and more suitable for implementing sensor networks. Since the protocol is simpler than Bluetooth, it requires less computational resources and the cost per network antenna is significantly smaller than other technologies. Power efficiency in a wireless system does reflect also on the power used for transmission, setting the electromagnetic radiation to an almost null amount (especially with respect to the signal power used by standard GSM/3G antennas.

The ZigBee network is naturally structured to send data to one node, and it supports cryptography and network IDs so that it is possible to define multiple overlapping networks in a secure way. MaxStream is one of the manufacturers of chips implementing the ZigBee protocol and distributes the popular XBee chip. XBee is an autonomous microcontroller speaking the ZigBee protocol, it is small and it can be easily configured to send data to a particular node (in our case connected to the home gateway). A transmission node will costs around 30€ plus the cost of sensors and actuators connected to it. For electric-related communications we can also use transmission over power-line to communicate to a single ZigBee node responsible for proxy data to the home gateway.