A Novel Optimal Wireless Thermal Sensor Placement Approach for Large Commercial Buildings

The widespread use of IoT devices and advances in communication technology have led to rapid development in building management systems. Considered one of the heaviest loads in commercial buildings, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) has been the focus of numerous studies. This paper proposes a novel approach to provide the optimal thermal sensor location for a large commercial building. The approach combines Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), network coverage, and clustering to establish a multi-step flow leading to the discovery of the optimal placements within the area of interest. The simulation results show that the combination of CFD and clustering can be very effective to identify potential candidates, which is then tuned using the coverage area of the network. Multiple scenarios were considered to simulate several environmental conditions, each of which leads to a different set of locations.