Environmental monitoring of school buildings and awareness of energy saving

Project objectives

The project aims to design and build a prototype for environmental monitoring within an environmental context relating to school buildings.

The aim is to obtain interrelated information that can help identify critical environmental issues, such as excessive CO2 concentration, excessive vibrations, abnormal temperatures, and provide suggestions on actions to be implemented, such as opening windows, turning off lights, closing curtains, and more, in order to improve the state of the school environment, involving teachers and students. Furthermore, the information obtained can be used to optimize the use of spaces and resources (light, heating, ventilation, ...), as well as to define priorities in maintenance interventions. For this purpose, the project aims to create a sensorized IoT device (called for simplicity in this document MonitorS, School Monitoring), replicable and extendable and equipped with open and standardized management and access interfaces. This device will be directly accessible, providing a monitoring dashboard via a web service on a local network. Furthermore, this device will be accompanied by an event classification library and a prototype cloud management part designed to complete a demonstrator of use, even remote, of the device in relevant scenarios. The cloud system will implement a minimal architecture for recording and managing MonitorS devices, for data collection through a time-series database, and a dashboard usable on laptop, tablet and smartphone devices for the presentation of real-time data and equipped with configurable alarm triggers. The system thus constituted will allow monitoring the environments in which it is positioned and will be able to provide, also by integrating and interfacing with external services (forecasting and nowcasting), suggestions for better management of the environment and to support student awareness of energy and environmental issues.

The dashboards, local and cloud, will allow real-time monitoring of the parameters measured by the single unit and an entire complex or multiple complexes, to the advantage, respectively, of the classroom teacher, the principal of the institute and the school authorities. The distributed nature of the system will allow comparison between different environments, different classrooms, favoring the implementation of gamification logics and the implementation of "competitions" between multiple classes and possibly between multiple complexes on the best management of the environments, helping and encouraging students to work to improve their study environment.

Furthermore, it will be possible to create maps to define “comfort zones” within the complex and to support the optimization of the use of spaces and the definition of priorities for maintenance interventions.

The integration of MonitorS with the cloud will allow to historicize and model the data in order to capture valuable information for use scenarios, allowing for example to build Digital Twin models, useful not only for monitoring, but also for simulating intervention strategies.

For this purpose, Sogei has decided to avail itself of the experience of the Campus Bio-Medico University (UCBM) on the issues relating to this project.

Start and end date

Project Manager

Prof. Luca Vollero, UR Manager

Prof. Marco Santonico, UR Manager

Coordinating institution of the project

Funding source(s).

• Sogei SpA