A Novel Approach for Deploying Minimum Sensors in Smart Buildings

Buildings, viewed as cyber-physical systems, become smart by deploying Building Management Systems (BMS). They should be aware about the state and environment of the building. This is achieved by developing a sensing system that senses different interesting factors of the building, called as “facets of sensing.” Depending on the application, different facets need to be sensed at various locations. Existing approaches for sensing these facets consist of deploying sensors at all the places so they can be sensed directly. But installing numerous sensors often aggravate the issues of user inconvenience, cost of installation and maintenance, and generation of e-waste. This article proposes how intelligently using the existing information can help to estimate the facets in cyber-physical systems like buildings, thereby reducing the sensors to be deployed. In this article, an optimization framework has been developed, which optimally deploys sensors in a building such that it satisfies BMS requirements with minimum number of sensors. The proposed solution is applied to real-world scenarios with cyber-physical systems. The results indicate that the proposed optimization framework is able to reduce the number of sensors by 59% and 49% when compared to the baseline and heuristic approach, respectively.