Optimization of Sensor Configurations for Fault Identification in Smart Buildings

In predictive maintenance an important problem is to optimize the quantity of information to be transmitted at the control center to guarantee reliable fault detection while limiting sensor power consumption. This problem relies directly on the sensor configurations (e.g., sampling rate, coding, quantization) and the fault detection algorithm. To address this question, we introduce a codesign framework and an algorithm for joint optimization of the sensor configurations and the accuracy of the fault detection classifier. In a use case based on a dataset consisting of multiple sensor measurements and heating power levels known as the Twin House Experiment, we show that our algorithm can find efficient tradeoffs between sensor power consumption and classifier accuracy.