Large buildings cause more than 20% of the global energy consumption in advanced countries. In buildings such as hospitals, cooling loads represent an important percentage of the overall energy demand (up to 44%) due to the intensive use of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems among other key factors, so their study should be considered. In this paper, we propose a data-driven analysis for improving the efficiency in multiple-chiller plants. Coefficient of performance (COP) is used as energy efficiency indicator. Data analysis, based on aggregation operations, filtering and data projection, allows us to obtain knowledge from chillers and the whole plant, in order to define and tune management rules. The plant manager software (PMS) that implements those rules establishes when a chiller should be staged up/down and which chiller should be started/stopped according different efficiency criteria. This approach has been applied on the chiller plant at the Hospital of León.

The application of Information and Communication Technologies to education has promoted the development of new educational methodologies that lead to new learning spaces. A particular case, especially in the engineering field, is that of Virtual and Remote Laboratories through the Internet. These are powerful tools that let the student operate on simulated and/or real technological equipment with the only requirements of a PC, a web browser and an Internet connection. In this work, we present a virtual laboratory of an educational set for d.c. motor control, Feedback MS-150, which is widely used as practical equipment in laboratories of introductory control theory courses. A simulation of all the functionalities of the modular equipment was developed in Easy Java Simulation (EJS). The simulation was included in the Remote Laboratory of Automatic Control at the University of León (LRA-ULE), which is managed by a Drupal content management system. Engineering students have regularly used the virtual laboratory and have evaluated it through surveys.