Smart buildings and "smart energy" applications generate huge amounts of data, that is hard to manage, understand and visualize. In particular, in the energy sector, data collected by environmental sensors and energy meters located in the building are highly variable in terms of physical quantities, units of measure, sampling frequency, and covered areas.
A business-intelligence approach is therefore needed, and ofted used, to aggregate all these data streams and to offer powerful analysis and visualization solutions. Unfortunately, such BI systems are often configured by data analysts, that not always understand the needs of energy managers.
The Master Thesis of Matteo Paracchino, who recently graduated in Management Engineering, explores the data analysis and visualization issue from the point of view of the Energy Managers: a national-wide survey has been conducted across all registered energy managers. The survey highlights the main needs and requirements of energy managers in terms of granularity of data collection, type of data analysis, and nature of the visualization solutions.
Starting from this valuable set of requirements, the thesis proceeds to building a BI solution, using open-source tools, that analyzes the data provided by the Smart and Green Building management services of Politecnico di Torino.
For more information about Business Intelligence applications for Energy Managers in the context of smart buildings, please see Matteo Paracchino's Master Thesis materials: