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Human-in-the-Loop Thermal Management for Smart Buildings

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Intelligent Building Control Systems

Part of the book series: Advances in Industrial Control ((AIC))

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Abstract

While the primary purpose of most buildings is to provide a safe and comfortable environment for its occupants, most of the current studies and solutions developed for building thermal control have been designed independent of the occupant feedback. An acceptable temperature range for the occupancy level is estimated, and control input is designed to maintain temperature within that range during occupancy hours. Consider office floors, conference rooms, student dorms, homes, and other multi-occupant spaces where temperature is chosen irrespective of the number of occupants and their individual preferences. This existing approach is not only non- user-centric but also suboptimal from both energy consumption and occupant satisfaction/productivity perspectives. It is thus highly desirable for such multi-occupant spaces to have a mechanism that would take into account each occupant’s individual comfort preference and the energy cost, to come up with optimal thermal setting. Individual occupant’s feedback and preference can be obtained through wearable sensors or smart phone applications. In this chapter, we propose algorithms that take into account each occupant’s preferences along with the thermal correlations between different zones in a building, to arrive at optimal thermal settings for all zones of the building in a coordinated manner. First, we present a control algorithm that uses binary occupant feedback based on singular perturbation theory to minimize aggregate user discomfort and total energy cost. A consensus algorithm for attaining a common temperature setpoint in a typical multi-occupant space is presented next that uses Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to solve the consensus problem. We use our Watervliet, NY-based test facility to demonstrate the performance of our algorithms.

Parts of the work in this chapter have been extracted from [1] (©[2015] IEEE. Reprinted, with permission, from S.K. Gupta, K. Kar, S. Mishra, J.T. Wen, “Collaborative energy and thermal comfort management through distributed consensus algorithms,” IEEE Trans. Automation Science and Eng., vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 1285–1296, Oct. 2015.).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Award - 1230687.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ECSE Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 12180, USA

    Santosh K. Gupta & Koushik Kar

Authors
  1. Santosh K. Gupta
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  2. Koushik Kar
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Santosh K. Gupta .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA

    John T. Wen

  2. Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA

    Sandipan Mishra

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Gupta, S.K., Kar, K. (2018). Human-in-the-Loop Thermal Management for Smart Buildings. In: Wen, J., Mishra, S. (eds) Intelligent Building Control Systems. Advances in Industrial Control. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68462-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68462-8_8

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