Fuzzy Logic Controllers for energy efficiency consumption in buildings

In EU countries, primary energy consump-tion in buildings represents about 40 % of to-tal energy consumption and more than a half of this energy is used for indoor climate con-ditions. The use of appropriate automatic control strategies for passive systems control could result in energy savings when compared to manual control. Fuzzy Logic Controllers (FLCs) have been successfully applied to a wide range of real-world problems from differ-ent areas. However, due to the complexity of the problem, the development of smart tun-ing techniques for these controllers will en-able a rational operation and improved per-formance of FLCs and it is a necessary con-dition to solve it. The problem has some specific restrictions that get it to be very particular and complex because of there are large time restrictions due to the long computation of the model and to the necessity of a multiobjective fitness function, that enlarges the solution search space. In order to solve the first restriction, a two-stage tuning methodology is proposed, in which the first stage is a rough global tun-ing (using a Genetic Algorithm) and the sec-ond one is a refined local tuning (using a Simulated Annealing). The second restric-tion is solved by multiobjective techniques that allow to work with fitness functions with competitive objectives. This combination of tuning with different search space granular-ity and multiobjective approaches is a novel way of facing up to these kinds of problems. This work is being carried out within the framework of the GENESYS European Project