Commercial building is one of the major energy consumers worldwide. Among the building services, the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) system dominates the total energy consumption. Recent studies have proposed various approaches to audit, automate and optimize energy usage of the HVAC system. Nevertheless, these schemes seldom discuss human thermal comfort. To minimize complaints, the current practice of the facility management is to adopt very conservative temperatures, leading to massive waste of energy.In this paper, we actively take thermal comfort into consideration. We propose a participatory approach allowing the occupants provide feedback regarding their comfort levels. A major challenge for a participatory design is to reduce intrusiveness of the system. To this end, we develop a temperature comfort correlation model that can build a profile for each occupant. The decision of setpoint temperature can be primarily model-driven, requiring minimal inputs of the occupants. We validated our model with field experiments. Besides, we developed a setpoint optimization algorithm to handle the diverging thermal requirements of multiple occupants in same room, and examined the model with simulations. We implemented our design and conducted field experiments in a University and a commercial office. Results showed that our algorithm can successfully maintain high thermal comfort, while reducing 18% of energy consumption.
Abstract-We develop a wireless system that can (partially) substitute the wired infrastructure underlying Building Automation and Control network (BACnet) of the Building Management System (BMS). There exists effort (e.g., from ZigBee alliance) to develop wireless components for BMS, while they build from bottom up which may lead to change and re-standardization of a new BACnet protocol. There are entirely new infrastructure proposed (e.g., sMAP) to collect physical information. These schemes require a longer time to be adopted. Our system does not need any modification of BACnet. We believe that our design experience is useful for other applications where wired infrastructure and a complete set of upper layer protocols exist; and it is now considered cost-effective to convert the system to (partially) wireless.Our experience shows that a direct replacement of wires to wireless links does not work. There are a number of difficulties, including a strict time constraint for a frame to exist before the system consider it as outdated. Our solution is to propose an asynchronous-response framework so as to keep the control flow of the upper layer protocol intact. In the demo we will 1) bring the physical devices and explain our system on site and 2) show a video of a real world experiment of our system.
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