Enabling the Use of Environmentally-sustainable Energy-harvesting Sensors in the Smart Building Automation Domain

Low-power wireless sensors that use harvested energy (e.g., from light) do not require batteries and contribute significantly to higher environmental sustainability. However, the constrained and non-deterministic availability of ambient energy means that sensors and automation agents deployed to control and monitor physical environments must coordinate and collaborate at run time. Current methods to achieve this require extensive upfront engineering and are not adaptive to changes in energy availability. We propose an approach where low-power wireless sensors, functioning as agents in a multi-agent system, use their local knowledge to autonomously evaluate their functional capabilities and energy availability to decide about role adoption, both at run time. Knowledge about system organization and functional profiles that they require is disseminated in the network. Our evaluation, conducted in a real-life setting, demonstrates that this approach simplifies system design and leads to higher efficacy in fulfilling measurement roles. Our results furthermore show improved utilization of the energy-harvesting sensors, leading to increased usage of sustainably harvested energy while minimizing the use of battery-powered sensors in the system, thereby prolonging their lifetime.