Using Sensor Data to Predict the Environment in a Building

Published

February 25, 1998

Author(s)

Walter W. Jones, Richard D. Peacock, Glenn P. Forney, Paul A. Reneke

Abstract

As transducers become more commonplace in the built environment, it is desirable to utilize this information in a more complete way to assure safety. There are two fi to doing this, incorporating our knowledge of fires and other extreme events into the measuri and reporting capability, and insuring that all systems are functioning the way they were intended to. The former is commonly referred to as smart sensing, while the latter deals with fault detection and the needed redundancy. These are the prime components of a system which wil allow reliable real-time prediction of the environment in a building. In order to accomplish these tasks, it is important to have access to information about the building and its environment. This requires a common protocol to provide the data from a multitude of sensors and sufficient computing capacity to utilize the data to provide some indication of future events. The former problem is exacerbated by the wide variety of sensors a the confounding problem that sensors have traditionally been used to signal a specific event. Tl BACnet protocol is designed to allow a wide variety of manufactures of sensors such as heat ar, smoke detectors to collaborate with traditional building transducers such as velocity probes and door-closure indicators. The protocol has the virtue that many types of events, including analog signals, bimodel information, reset states and many others, exist or can be defined, allowing a great flexibility in communication while enforcing deterministic behavior on a potentially chaot. system. The shortcoming in understanding what the plethora of information means is transcende by providing sufficient computing and memory capacity to allow reasonable algorithms a chance to work. Taken together, we are trying to understand what transducer actually tell us about the environment in a building. The technical perspective is the most fascinating.

Proceedings Title

National Fire Protection Research Foundation

Conference Dates

February 25-27, 1998

Conference Location

Orlando, FL

Conference Title

Fire Suppression and Detection Research Application Symposium. Research and Practice: Bridging the Gap

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

fire suppression, fire detection, fire research, fire safety, fire models, predictive models, smoke movement, tranducers, sensors

Citation

Jones, W. , Peacock, R. , Forney, G. and Reneke, P. (1998), Using Sensor Data to Predict the Environment in a Building, National Fire Protection Research Foundation, Orlando, FL, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=912869 (Accessed April 26, 2024)