Supervisory control for energy savings and thermal comfort in commercial building HVAC systems. AAAI

The operation and maintenance of commercial building HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) systems is illustrative of an industry that can benefit from the insight-ful use of all available information sources. Modern HVAC systems using direct digital control can potentially provide useful performance data. Occupant feedback complaint data and HVAC system trend data are stored within modern main-tenance management databases. This paper will address the specific issue of integration and application of these funda-mental sources of information, using some modern and novel techniques. Examples are found in, but are not limited to the following areas: discrete-event, continuous, and hybrid control system theory, artificial intelligence, statistics, sys-tem identification, databases, etc. Methods specific to these areas can be used to synthesize a supervisory controller. The objective of this controller is to reduce energy costs, improve building occupant comfort, fault detection and diagnostic ca-pability. At the same time, the entire process needs to be stable, and the influence of occupant behavior needs to be taken full advantage of. The controller will achieve these ob-jectives by performing and/or prioritizing the appropriate ac-tions to be taken either automatically or by facility operators. Furthermore, the cost and scalability of the entire effort de-scribed can be positively influenced by recent technological advances in computing power, sensors, and databases