Reducing Carbon
Footprint in
Smart Buildings
CROATIA 2022

39%
annual global CO2 emissions generated by buildings
Source: Global status report 2018,
EIA

Source: Global status report 2018,
EIA

Heating Ventilatio
n
Air
Conditioning

Optimal energy consumption control for HVAC appliances

3rd party APIs
Smart Buildings
Load Forecasting
Anomaly Detection
Optimal Control

Building
Metadata
Sensor
Readings
Weather
Data
Custom
Integrations
Ingestion Storage Machine Learning

Anomaly Detection
Missing Data Sensor Value
Outliers
Unavailable
Data Sources

Sensor Value
Outliers
Using Median Absolute Deviation
(MAD)
■ Simple, robust method for outlier
detection
■ Calculated for every important metric
(indoor temperature, HVAC consumption,
etc.)
■ Distinction between different parts of the
day or week
■ Commonly used in time-series DBs (e.g.
InfluxDB)
■ Threshold balances false positives and
false negatives
■ Near-real time detection with Spark
Streaming

Load Forecasting
■ Hourly predictions
■ 31 features engineered from
building metadata, sensors,
and weather
■ 3M samples (2.4M train, 600k
test)
■ 3 years of data from 100s of
offices
■ Model robust to missing data
R2 0.8971
RMSE 0.1943
MAE 0.0934
Feature Store
Feature Store
Feature Store
Model
Model
Features
Training
Inference

Optimal Control
■ Reinforcement Learning Agent (DQN
and PPO)
■ Turns HVAC on/off based on user
constraints
■ Three modes:
- Optimal Comfort
- Optimal Savings
- Combined
■ Approach used in large data centers
Historical Data
Metadata
User Rules
Thermal
Model
Agent
Environment
Action
Reward
Rule: Every Monday from 9 am to 5 pm temperature should be between 22 and 26 degrees celsius

Live Testing
7 bank offices in Portugal
Optimal control for 4 weeks
with user feedback
218k EUR total annual HVAC cost

*between 20% and 35% energy savings depending on the office location
35%

Challenges

Integration Data Quality Pandemic
Testing
Partners

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovationprogramme
under grant agreement No 779790

Consistent
small steps lead to
impactful results

https://smartcat.io
info@smartcat.io