Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IISDue to the high cost of retrofitting digital building services, they are rarely found in existing buildings today. The main costs arise from the installation of additional sensors, metering points and their connection to communication networks as well as the logical integration of the data, i.e. the configuration of the systems. With wired sensor and meter systems, the laying of cables is particularly costly. These costs can be saved to a large extent with radio-based solutions, but these present the challenge of communication security and energy supply.
© Flughafen München
SKAMO – Scalable system monitoring in large properties
Initial situation
Review: Since 2019, several use cases with around 70 sensors have been carried out at Munich Airport with the “FutureIoT” research network, including a detailed analysis of the ventilation and air conditioning systems in Terminal 1 and the remote reading of meters. In September 2021, a further step was taken towards production by providing a base station from the company Swissphone.
Munich Airport's buildings and grounds are home to extensive energy systems consisting of electricity, heating and cooling generators, storage systems and consumers. This can regularly lead to unnecessary energy consumption, for example if isolated subsystems are faulty or not coordinated with each other.
The task now is to connect the approximately 280,000 data points in Munich Airport's current building automation system in order to optimize energy and load management. This should be done as cost-effectively as possible. At the same time, the solution used for this must be reliable in communication even with such a high number of data points and require as little energy as possible.
Solution
Together with Munich Airport, WEPTECH elektronik GmbH and Volue ASA, Fraunhofer IIS has launched the project “Scalable system monitoring in large properties” (SKAMO). An efficient and comprehensive rollout of mioty® technology is intended to solve the challenge of energy and load management in the project. mioty® is a wireless LPWAN technology that can connect a large number of sensor nodes for the Internet of Things (IoT) reliably and with low power consumption over long ranges.
In the project, an automated master data transfer as well as sensor-related and wireless reconfigurable data processing with mioty® is being tested at the airport. In addition, an intelligent database is being developed that automatically integrates the transferred master data into digital services or enables the services to configure themselves automatically. The sensor data will be used to enable further analysis of the operating status of supply networks, consumption and generation.
The project is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection. The SKAMO project started in May 2022 with a duration of 36 months and a funding volume of approx. 2 million euros.
Benefit
By implementing automatic energy management with mioty® in existing buildings and the resulting optimization of energy and load management, considerable amounts of energy, costs and CO2 emissions can be saved. This enables an important contribution to the energy transition in the building sector by optimizing the use of renewable energy sources to meet the needs of the supply.
Munich Airport is a suitable demonstration and test site for this project for several reasons. By operating its own combined heat and power plant, energy is generated that is consumed in many buildings and technical facilities. This offers the opportunity to examine and optimize the entire cycle from energy generation to consumption as a whole. Furthermore, many of the buildings have been in operation since 1992. It is therefore possible to analyze how the solutions developed in this project can be integrated into a long-standing infrastructure with a large volume of existing data.