Smart Temperature Control With Active Building Occupant Feedback

In current practice and existing solutions, temperature control in commercial buildings is mostly done independently of occupant feedback. Typically, an acceptable temperature range for the occupancy level is estimated, and the control solution is designed to maintain temperature within that range during occupancy hours while optimizing energy usage at the same time. In this work we incorporate active user (occupant) feedback to minimize aggregate user discomfort. User feedback is accepted in a convenient binary format which is then used to estimate the user’s comfort range (discomfort function), taking into account possible inaccuracies in the feedback provided. The control algorithm design also takes the energy cost into account, trading it off optimally with the aggregate user discomfort. A lumped heat transfer model based on thermal resistance and capacitance is used to model a multi-zone building, and singular perturbation theory is utilized to analyze the system. Under sufficient time scale separation between temperature dynamics and user feedback frequency, we establish convergence of the proposed solution to the desired temperature that minimizes the sum of the energy cost plus user discomfort. Simulation results on a four-room example are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach and validate the model.

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