Grant: Applied Research Tools and Instruments Grants

The Intelligent Building Automation Systems (IBAS) research group at George Brown College (GBC) closely collaborates with industry leaders on deployment, assessment, and development of new smart building and smart home technologies. Ongoing research activities aim to develop system integration solutions that not only reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions, but also improve the occupants' comfort and productivity. Along with skillful and knowledgeable researchers, leading-edge lab facilities with up-to-date systems and equipment are key success factors in every research project. GBC is requesting NSERC ARTI funding to procure equipment that enables integration of different disparate building automation technologies for better energy conservation and system improvement. This equipment will support ongoing and planned collaborative research projects with industry partners that are aligned with its NSERC Industrial Research Chair for Colleges (IRCC) in Smart Connected Buildings research program (2015-2020) led by Dr. Amir Shabani. *The ARTI equipment will enhance GBC's research and development capacity in smart home/building automation and will enable several college-industry applied research projects. The proposed equipment will support development efforts by automation and energy management technology companies active in designing, manufacturing and commercializing innovative IBAS products and services. The proposed equipment will augment existing infrastructure and allow GBC research teams to create a brand-agnostic platform-independent testbed for integration of different building automation technologies, collect and analyze data on occupancy, residence preferred settings, energy consumption, quality of service (e.g. air) and more, from live test sites. The controllers will pull the data from the sensor networks and transfer it to an existing cloud server for storage and analysis. GBC students, technologists and faculty researchers will also be able to collaborate with their industry partners on investigating the best automation integration practices. Through participation in these industry projects, students will learn the necessary tools and gain real-world expertise that the evolving industry of building automation will require. Simultaneously, partner companies will benefit from GBC's expertise in development of their products, which will in turn benefit the economy, regionally and nationally.*