Campus sustainability through AI

Abstract

Whether it's classrooms, dormitories, faculty residences, or open spaces, the problem of electricity wastage is pervasive on our campus. Recently, the new dorms (Dorm 35-43) have been constructed and a few students including us were shifted there. Each room there contains 3 tube lights, 1 fan, 1 AC, and 2-3 LED lights among other amenities. The fact that students leave their rooms with the lights and fans running was very upsetting. Many students forget to turn off the light in the balcony during the day because of the low visibility of the light. Apart from the room, there are common areas and ground floor areas which contain multiple tube lights and fans which remain running even when no one is using them. Hostels aren't the only places where this is an issue; classrooms, shared bathrooms, the faculty residence, and other open areas like hallways, grounds, the library, etc. all suffer from similar problems of energy wastage. This problem made us more vigilant about the situation and motivated us to come up with a solution for the same using Artificial Intelligence. We made the decision to take one step at a time in order to save energy. Because we live here and have a good understanding of how the electricity usage and its bill work at this location, we thought it would be best to start by conserving energy in the dormitories. With this project we have tried to identify areas of energy wastage, quantified it to know the magnitude and then tried to propose feasible solutions to curtail it.