Building Management System and Data Sharing Platform for Passive Cooling Strategies Assessment and Users’ Awareness Increase: Design and Application to a Social Housing Context in Italy

The development and application of Building Management Systems (BMSs) provide different benefits, related to optimizing real-time building monitoring and analysis, understanding users’ behavior toward systems and components, collecting data to reduce the performance gap in building energy models, and also promoting users’ awareness based on automation and control systems and feedback solutions. This paper deals with the design and application of a smart, wireless, reversible, and low-impact BMS, integrated into two existing social housing buildings, selected as demo cases in the European “LIFE SUPERHERO” project. The information obtained from installed sensors (outdoor and indoor environmental conditions, occupants’ behavior, roof performance) is stored in a server, thus allowing researchers to access data in real-time, and to carry out analyses related to the indicators and objective of the project itself (e.g., reduction of cooling energy consumptions, comfort optimization, etc.). Raw and processed data are then reported in a web-based Data Sharing Platform, called “HUman-BEhaviors monitoring data Sharing” (HU-BES) that provides qualitative and quantitative user-friendly data representation to specialized and un-specialized end-users, such as designers, stakeholders, and occupants. Both the BMS and HU-BES are developed to be flexible tools that can be further integrated depending on the evolution of the project, for example, by adding other sensors or showing different performance indicators.