Control strategy optimization for energy efficiency and comfort management in HVAC systems

One of the major tasks for achieving building automation is to implement an effective control strategy on the heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. The HVAC system should be properly controlled to provide a relatively constant and comfortable temperature as well as fresh and filtered air with a comfortable humidity range to the buildings. In this work, a hierarchical control structure is proposed to control the HVAC system with high efficiency. Both the building model and HVAC equipment models are developed to study the impact of HVAC system operations on the indoor environment. In the proposed control system, an optimizer is embedded which using swarm intelligence to coordinate each unit in the HVAC system to reduce energy consumption. Comparison studies are carried out to study the real-time performance of the proposed control strategy in a building environment.