IoT monitoring to evaluate energy and water consumption in laboratory environment

Abstract

Operational energy and water consumption of buildings are informative and may not adequately reflect environmental impacts. Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring can assist in real-time data collection and analysis to support a more accurate Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The main objective of this article is to understand the needs, difficulties and benefits of implementing IoT monitoring to help evaluate energy and operational water consumption in a laboratory environment. The conduct of this article followed the experimental research methodology. The LCA-based IoT architecture has four layers: perception, data, services and applications. As a necessity, the interdisciplinarity of the team is an important aspect to be considered. As difficulties, communication problems with devices and latencies in the local internet network were observed. This research confirmed previous research stating that IoT monitoring brings greater precision to LCA by considering different time horizons, thus incorporating variation in occupant behavior, dynamic characteristic factors and dynamic weighting factors.