Efficiency and reliability have been essential requirements for energy generation in smart cities. This study presents the design and development of dependable control schemes for microgrid management, which can be seamlessly integrated into the management system of smart buildings. Here, to recover from failures in the solar energy system of a building microgrid, dependable controllers are proposed along with their hardware implementation. The system features the use of Internet of Things (IoT) as its core to coordinate the operation of multiple subsystems in a scalable manner. The control scheme uses a number of controllers cooperatively functioning via a token-based mechanism within the network to provide redundancy and thus reliability in solar tracking. The system exploits data from not only local in-situ sensors but also online sources via IoT networks for fault-tolerant control. Experiments conducted in a 12-storey building indicate that the harvested solar energy meets the design requirement while the control reliability is maintained in face of communication or hardware disruptions. The results confirmed the validity of the proposed approach and its applicability to energy management in smart buildings.

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IoT-enabled dependable control for solar energy harvesting in smart buildings

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