A System for Enabling Facility Management to Achieve Deterministic Energy Behaviour in the Smart Grid Era

The vision of the Smart Grid empowers a variety of innovative approaches for flexible energy management that fuse the business goals with the asset monitoring and control offered by the Internet of Things. The facility management domain can benefit from these advances by building upon Smart Grid energy services thereby realizing new business opportunities that make the best out of its assets. Due to the increasing integration of highly dynamic assets in future buildings, short-term deterministic behaviour is difficult. However with the availability of controlled variable storage, and futuristic services such as energy trading, errors in prediction can be absorbed internally or traded with the ultimate aim of “making the best” out of the assets and situations. The latter has the potential to enable facility managers to reach strategic objectives and potentially use assets more effectively by seizing new business opportunities. In this work we propose an architecture, describe its key components and depict in scenarios its usage with the goal of enabling facility management to take informed business decisions by following enterprise strategies as well as considering the volatility of the available energy excess or shortage.