Indoor-environment simulator for control design purposes

Building-management systems (BMSs) are becoming increasingly important as they are an efficient means to having buildings that consume less energy as well as for improving the indoor working and living environments. On the other hand, implementing automated control and monitoring systems in buildings is still relatively new, and one of the obstacles for their wider implementation is the ease of setting up the appropriate parameters for the controllers. During our work on an experimental controller for an indoor environment that is installed in an occupied office in the building of the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, it has become evident that a computer simulator of the system would be a welcome aid for the optimization of its functioning. In this paper we present a simulator application developed in a combined Matlab/Simulink and Dymola/Modelica environment. The simulator mirrors the functioning of the control system and the dynamics of the indoor environment, where the thermal model of the simulator was developed in the Dymola/Modelica environment, while the illuminance model was developed and parameterized as a black-box model on the basis of measurements in the Matlab environment. The simulator can emulate the response of conventional ON/OFF controllers as well as fuzzy controllers. The paper presents the design of the simulator with all of the key elements described. The underlying models for the thermal and illuminance control are also separately described. Finally, the performance of the simulator is presented for a selected day.