ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the key issues involved in energy efficiency in buildings. It reviews the main related works which propose partial solutions to the problem. The chapter presents a general architecture proposal for management systems of smart buildings, which is modeled in three layers with different functionalities. It describes our proposal for an energy efficiency building management system. This proposal tackles three different subproblems. It explains the experiments carried out to evaluate and validate the different proposals and mechanisms developed in this work. The chapter explains some conclusions and an outlook of future work. Optimizing energy efficiency in buildings is an integrated task that comprises the whole lifecycle of the building. Smart buildings should prevent users from having to perform routine and tedious tasks to achieve comfort, security, and effective energy management.
