Communicating devices are on the rise. Fueled by the introduction of Internet-of-Thing (IoT) and Industry 4.0, more and more devices are capable of information sharing. There is a long history of communicating devices in industrial and building management contexts that previously relied on fieldbuses. One of these legacy fieldbuses is the Modbus protocol, originating in serial communication and now adapted for use with Ethernet. It has significant adoption in the fields of industrial automation systems (IAS) and building management systems (BMS) but carries many limitations. Industrial systems often have a long lifespan and fundamental changes are not introduced quickly. This leads to a need for legacy communication protocols to be able to function alongside the new paradigms for the foreseeable future. In order to facilitate this phase, an attempt to improve system integration in the Modbus context is performed in this thesis. By utilizing standardization and automation principles, additional functionality and definitions are proposed to the Modbus protocol to help improve system integration. By using interviews with system integrators and document reviews of available Modbus description documents three iterative development processes are performed to answer the research questions.  A proposed data model is presented, allowing for a standardized way to represent the contents of a Modbus register. Its attributes are clearly defined with descriptions and constraints. A new function code specification (0x47) is defined and presented in the same form as other function codes are described in the current Modbus specification. It allows for Modbus descriptors to be retrieved directly from the slave device. As a proof-of-concept the function code is developed in an existing Modbus implementation (Modbus4J). A client application is created to allow for fully functional demonstrations for a broader audience. The resulting communication is captured in Wireshark and presented as proof-of-concept.

The energy consumption of the use phase of buildings accounts for almost 30 per-cent of the global energy consumption and is expected to increase in the coming years (Santamouris and Vasilakopoulou, 2021). Furthermore, increasing demand for energy-efficient buildings can be expected due to the introduction of legislative frameworks, such as the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive and the Energy Efficiency Directive (European Commission, 2022b). With the use of building management systems, the energy use of a building can be monitored and optimized (Joseph, 2018). However, it is important not to shift the saved energy use of the building onto the large number of electronic devices needed in the systems. This can be prevented by using ecodesign, which refers to the integration of environmental aspects into the product development process (ISO, 2002).  This thesis aims to find solutions for reducing the environmental impact of electronic products in building management systems, both by finding redesign improvement options and improvement areas within the product development processes of the products. This involved a case study, conducted together with the R&D department at a multi-national company within the electrical equipment industry. Improvement options for four products within the building management system category were generated by using Quality Function Deployment for Environment, where normalized results from life cycle assessments of each product were used for environmental inputs. A total of six improvement options were developed, and the reduction in environmental impact that these would imply was quantified using life cycle assessments. For Product A, the prioritized option was to extend the lifetime of the product from 10 to 15 years. For Product B, changing the production country from Romania to Sweden would reduce the impacts the most. For Product C and Product D, introducing a power-saving mode was the most preferable option. Furthermore, improvement suggestions for environmental sustainability in the product development process at the company were developed by using a four-step method inspired by Charter and Tischner (2001), and ecodesign success factors identified by Johansson (2002). This resulted in nine improvement suggestions within the areas of management, customer relationships, development processes, and competence. Two aspects were considered to be of higher importance; 1. to specify the value and benefits of implementing ecodesign together with relevant stakeholders, and to identify activities and resources needed to achieve that; 2. to consider environmental aspects already at the first step of the product development process. It was also shown that it is of importance to create ecodesign implementation strategies and tools that are customized to the specific company considered for successful integration of environmental aspects in the product development process.

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Yes / Energy consumption (EC) of consumers primarily depends on comfort level (CL) affirmed by brain sensations of the central nervous system. Environmental parameters such as surroundings, relative humidity, air temperature, solar irradiance, air pressure, and cloud cover directly influence consumer body temperature that in return affect blood dynamics perturbing brain comfort sensations. This CL (either in summer, winter, autumn, or spring season) is a function of external environment and internal body variations that force a consumer toward EC. To develop a new concept of consumer's EC, first the authors described environment parameters in detail with relation to surroundings and EC. Considering this, they tabulated a generic relation of consumer's CL with EC and environment temperature. Second, to build an inter-related bond between the environmental effects on consumer body dynamics, they analysed theoretically and mathematically above mutual relations between medical and environmental sciences. Finally, they present their conceptual EC model based on a closed-loop feedback system. This model is a complex non-linear adaptive system with environmental and surrounding parameters as input to the system resulting in an optimised EC, considering consumer CL as a key parameter for the system.