Indoor environmental satisfaction has been receiving considerable attention by many researchers recently. Research has indicated that allowing building occupants to adjust their local environment to their liking increases satisfaction and human performance. However, concern about the possible increase of energy consumption associated with the wide adoption of distributed localized environmental control has limited the use of such systems. In this study, we show how gradient-based optimization can be used to minimize energy consumption of distributed environmental control systems without increasing occupant thermal dissatisfaction. Fuzzy rules have been generated by data from gradient optimization, showing that a fuzzy logic control scheme based on nearest neighbors approximates closely the gradient-based optimized results.

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