On predicted mean vote optimization in building climate control

Low energy buildings have been attracting much attention lately. Most of the research is focused on the building construction or alternative energy sources. Recently, there has been an intense research in the area of Model Predictive Control (MPC) for buildings. The main principle of such a controller is a trade-off between energy savings and user welfare making use of predictions of disturbances acting on the system (ambient temperature, solar radiation, occupancy, etc.). Usually, the thermal comfort is represented by a static range for the operative temperature according to the international standards. By contrast, this paper is devoted to the optimization of the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) index which, opposed to the static temperature range, describes user comfort directly. PMV index, however, is a nonlinear function of various quantities, which makes the problem more difficult to solve. The paper will show the main differences in MPC problem formulation, compare the control performance both to the conventional and predictive control strategies, point out that the proposed optimal control problem formulation shifts the savings potential of classical MPC by additional 11% and finally, the quality of the fulfillment of the thermal comfort will be addressed.