Enabling Energy Efficient HVAC Operation Through IWSNs

Many industrial processes rely on specific environmental conditions to ensure product quality and the well-being of human workers. To ensure the required production conditions, typically, energy-intensive Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are used. In this paper, we present a variable Industrial Wireless Sensor Network (IWSN) as well as the linked measurement strategy and two different real-world deployments. The sensor nodes can measure environmental conditions such as thermal comfort, air purity, and three-dimensional airflow. For reliable wireless communication, the nodes feature a dual transceiver radio that can operate at sub-1 GHz and 2.4 GHz frequency bands. The collected data is used for a cyber physical production system (CPPS) to provide decision support and enable a demand-driven control of HVAC systems. We show that even with energy savings as low as 5% through our CPPS, up to 3990.56t
$CO_{2}$
-eq could be saved per year in our exemplary real-world deployments.