The development work aims at reaching five objectives which are

1. To improve situational awareness and access control in buildings
2. To decrease energy consumption and reduce emissions in buildings
3. To optimize facility operation and maintenance work
4. To easily deploy and maintain the WSN networks in buildings, and
5. To increase the performance and scalability of building WSN solutions

Data mining, data fusion and context-aware reasoning utilising various types of data play a key role in the solution development. Data may be retrieved from camera feeds, drones, indoor positioning systems, or by monitoring overall indoor conditions like temperature and lighting using sensor data. The aim is to reduce the costs of the WSN itself by making it more energy efficient, easier to install, robust, less complex and scalable.

The developed solutions cover the whole chain of operators and customers in buildings: the owners, the service providers and the end users.

The building environment is confronted with different challenges compared to the other DEWI domains. The construction materials of buildings are different, the scale of the environment is usually much larger and the environment itself is much more stationary. These require different challenges to network performance, topology and scalability. In addition to this, the building market in Europe consists of up to 95% of renovation building as opposed to 5% of completely new construction. Hence, older building environments must also be taken into consideration in the solution development.

Applications and services under development are as follows:

• Solutions for flexible, secure and safe access of visitors and employees in dynamically configured office spaces as well as prevention of unauthorized access to buildings.
• Solutions for achieving significant cost savings and CO₂ emission reduction by saving energy in heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting systems utilising more optimal system control and smart power management. Target is energy costs reduction (5-10%) by using WSN enabled solutions.
• Solutions for facility management in order to gain the full advantage of predictive and condition based maintenance especially in existing buildings where until now the cost of installing wired sensor and actuator systems has been prohibitive. The target is reduction of maintenance costs (10-20%) by WSN enabled technologies.

Moreover, development of technological solutions for efficient, flexible and self-configuring installations of WSN systems is in focus.

In above solutions, special attention is being paid to needs and requirements for cyber security in WSN enabled building solutions.

Utilisation, adaptation and development of following technologies play a remarkable role in the application and solution development in the building domain.

• Advanced data processing
  • WSN data aggregation and fusion technologies
  • WSN data utilization in energy and maintenance optimization

• Context aware technologies
  • Indoor positioning technologies
  • Access and assets control management technologies

• More efficient WSN technologies
  • Scalability of WSNs in buildings
  • OTA programming, monitoring and control of WSNs
  • WSN communication improvements

The building domain consists of the following five use cases:

• Use Case 5.1 – WSN for situational awareness in building security: In this use case WSN based solutions provide data from visual, indoor positioning and unmanned drone based sources. This data is fused and processed into information that produces an enhanced understanding of the situation inside the building and in the near vicinity.
• Use Case 5.2- Efficient WSN design for deployment and maintenance costs reduction: This Use Case focuses on the technical aspects of the WSN solutions for a building. Scalability, energy efficiency, communication robustness and flexible deployment and maintenance of the WSN solutions are the target.
• Use Case 5.3 – WSN for facility and housing energy optimization: The WSN solution developed in this Use Case aims to create energy optimization solution via monitoring indoor conditions and lighting. Based on the monitoring data both the building automation systems and the lighting systems are controlled wirelessly.
• Use Case 5.4 – WSN for facility operation and maintenance: The focus of this Use Case is to create a basis for planned and even pre-emptive maintenance actions for facilities by monitoring indoor conditions and providing data from automated lighting systems via WSN solutions. Utilization of context-awareness and reasoning on the data plays a key role in reducing the maintenance costs.
• Use Case 5.5 – WSN for access control and assets management: In this Use Case the focus is on tracking people and assets inside a facility for access control scenarios. The Use Case develops WSN technology for indoor positioning of people and assets, a gateway for wireless data aggregation and a device for indoor user assistance. Information security is also considered.

Firstly, each of the Use Cases develops smaller demonstrators of the sub-systems utilising technologies developed or adapted. Secondly, these smaller demonstrators are combined into two larger demonstrators showcasing the complete work of the building domain.

The current plan is to have one demonstrator in Poland, which will mainly showcase the combined work of the Use Cases 5.1 and 5.5. This demonstrator is called WSN for access control and assets management. The work of the Use Cases 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 is planned to be showcased in Finland. The name of this demonstrator is WSN for building energy efficiency, operation and maintenance.

The demonstrators should be available for the public to certain extend.

The work in the Use Cases of the Building Domain follows the four tasks defined in DEWI:

• collect requirements,
• define specifications,
• develop and implement and test,
• validate and asses.

Each of the Use Cases of the Building Domain will produce at least one deliverable for each of the tasks. The deliverable types range from reports to prototypes and demonstrations. Typically, the requirements and specifications phase results are provided as reports while the implementation and testing phase tasks produce prototypes and demonstrations. Some of the Use Cases follow an iterative approach for one or more of the tasks, producing a revised version of the results.

The Interoperability Work package (WP) will produce domain wide versions of the requirements and specifications with a special focus on the technology items. The Demonstration WP will produce requirements and specifications of the final demonstrators as reports and finally the complete work of Building Domain as two demonstrators.

In general, the requirements phase and test, validate and asses -phase deliverables are publicly available.