Miguel Molina-Solana

This paper introduces the concept of Comfort as a Service (CaaS), a new energy supply paradigm for providing comfort to residential customers. CaaS takes into account the available passive and active elements, the external factors that affect energy consumption and associated costs, and occupants’ behaviours to automatically generate optimal control strategies for the domestic equipment. In consequence, it releases building occupants from operating the equipment, which gives rise to a disruption of the traditional model of paying per consumed energy in favour of a model of paying per provided comfort. In the paper, we envision a realization of CaaS based on several technologies such as Ambient Intelligence, Big Data, Cloud Computing and Predictive Computing. We discuss the opportunities and the barriers of CaaS-centred business, and exemplify the potential of CaaS deployments by quantifying the expected energy savings achieved after limiting occupants’ control over the air conditioning system in a test scenario.

@article{Gomez2018b,
  author = {G\'omez-Romero, Juan and Molina-Solana, Miguel and Ros, Mar\'ia and Ruiz, M.~Dolores and Martin-Bautista, Mar\'ia~J.},
  title = {Comfort as a Service: a new paradigm for residential environmental quality control},
  journal = {Sustainability},
  year = {2018},
  volume = {10},
  number = {9},
  articleno = {3053},
  doi = {10.3390/su10093053},
  issn = {2071-1050},
  comment = {https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/9/3053/pdf},
  timestamp = {15}
}