The high impact of buildings' energy consumption has led to the need for achieving energy-efficient buildings to reduce CO2 emissions and energy consumption. This has triggered intensive research activities at a global scale.

The discussion on energy-efficiency in the building sector has become ubiquitous, as has become the effort of achieving improved operational performance along with a lower lead time from building design to commissioning, and the development of tools to support facility management and operation. The development and integration of ICT technologies can help best coordinate building design and operation and thus contribute to achieving energy performance objectives.

Despite significant advances, there exist no tools that are capable of streamlining the whole process and achieving in a systematic and well-defined way design objectives. Data Analysis, Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced automated control are a perfect combination as key areas of applications on the scenario of Smart Buildings (SB). In this direction, the approach of this project is to apply insights from big data algorithms to data from SB for energy efficiency and performance optimization goals.

We will address single buildings needs as well as their cooperation embedded in building communities. We will benefit of data analysis and the potential of the knowledge discovery from sensed data in buildings, which enables real-time system monitoring, management, optimization and anticipation. We will propose a general approach to model the energy consumption associated with services provided in buildings to help select the best strategies to save energy.

Special interest will be paid in Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, which represents the 76% of the total energy consumed by buildings in most European countries, thus there is a clear need to address this problem. IoT has enabled to record vast amounts of data that need to be analysed in order to reveal interesting relationships, which can be modelled in order to anticipate and respond efficiently to certain events for the benefits of both private and public entities.

Methods, techniques and tools from diverse disciplines have been combined to help analyse such datasets [1]. In this sense, a SB should be able to monitor status parameters, analyse these data and, finally, actuate to reach the previous objectives, but considering transversal and essential goals such as cost and, more recently, energy efficiency [2] [3]. SB must be capable not only of improving inhabitant experience and productivity, but also they must provide mechanisms to make the most of the purchased energy and be able to integrate their own energy sources.

In this line, the reference scenarios about SB in this project will offer a practical view of the application of a generic systematic approach in a solution to monitor energy consumption of the most important subsystems of buildings, provide intelligent decisions for controlling devices with the aim of reducing the energy consumption and improve the inhabitants comfort.